


other worlds than these

by nayanroo



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Shiro Big Bang 2017, Violence, hopelessness, shiro whump, stranger things inspired, tags and rating to be safe, zarkogorgon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 21:39:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12713454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nayanroo/pseuds/nayanroo
Summary: Washed out of his reality by a backwash of quintessence during the battle with Zarkon, Shiro wakes up in a dark, shadowed reflection of the Castle of Lions. But he's not alone; a monster stalks the halls, a monster that seems oddly drawn to him... and the pile of scrap metal that used to be the Black lion. While Allura and the other Paladins work to rescue him from this dark reality, Shiro must fight for his life or risk losing it to the monster... but the far more insidious fight is the one against hopelessness.





	other worlds than these

**Author's Note:**

> My piece for the Shiro Big Bang 2017. BIG props to my good good artist friends Skye (@froopinghiddles on tumblr) and Freddy (@freddy-draws-and-scribbles on tumblr) for bearing with me in these troubling times.
> 
> You ever joked so hard about something that you write it as a fic? Yeah.
> 
> Enjoy!

 

_Go now, there are other worlds than these._

-Jake Chambers, _The Dark Tower_

 

_Well, come on and let me know,_

_Should I stay or should I go?_

-The Clash

 

*

*

Standing by the empty pilot’s chair in the Black lion, she gave them permission to take as much time as they needed. She knew they would anyway; their pale and scared and exhausted faces told her they’d have done whatever they wanted even if she hadn’t told them, so she called upon all her training as a leader and a princess and projected an air of calm even as her heart shuddered in sudden emptiness, as her fingers gripped the chair hard enough to dent the foam.

Shiro had been here, she thought. Only a few _doboshes_ before. She could still feel the lingering warmth from his body, and when they’d invaded the cockpit it had looked like he’d just gotten up. His chair was only pushed back a little, his bayard in the dock. That was what bothered her and all of her Paladins, that thought that he could just pop out from behind a bulkhead with that crooked grin of his to congratulate them on their victory. But he didn’t and as far as she knew he wouldn’t, and so when the Paladins had filtered off she fit her fingers around the grip of his bayard and pulled it out.

 _What shape would this have taken for you?_ Allura wondered, looking at it. It didn’t seem the worse for wear despite having spent ten thousand years in the hands of Zarkon, but if the way Voltron had behaved when Shiro had used his bayard in battle was any indication, it would have been amazing to see what he’d do with it.

She realized she was beginning to think in past tense and scowled as she left the cockpit. She’d seal the hangar, she decided, looking back at the lion as she paused in the doorway. This lack of a Paladin, this emptiness, it was only temporary. The Black lion sat inside its shield, patient and silent. She thought she caught a glimmer of yellow in the lion’s eyes, but it was gone before she could fully process it, and shook her head. Wishful thinking wouldn’t fix this, and she had to find a way to lift the spirits of Paladins who ought to be celebrating, not grieving.

The castle hummed around her as she dropped off the bayard in the armory and returned to her own quarters, and she gave thanks that it was still capable of flight and wormhole generation. Debrief would have to wait, but Allura got the impression that Coran was already hard at work getting damage assessments and making any emergency repairs they needed to keep moving, keep fighting. A lot of the castle’s systems had been damaged badly in that last blast, and the war wasn’t over, just shortened. The lights flickered, there seemed to be scorch marks on the walls where relays had blown, and she saw cracks here and there that would need to be patched and fused.

 _Sorry, Father_ , Allura thought as she rested her palm on the controls for her door. _I’ve not taken very good care of what you left for me_.

He’d be proud though. Coran might have just been trying to lift her spirits, bolster her courage, but he’d known her father, and if he said the king would have been proud, she had to trust him.

Allura peeled off her sweaty and grimy battle suit, sighing in relief. The armor went to its cubby, the fabric suit into the cleaner, which began its cycle as she took her hair down, silver-white curls tumbling down over her shoulders. Allura ran her fingers through it with a grimace; she needed to put _herself_ through a cleansing cycle, but she’d put that off until she had a better idea of their resources. What she _did_ do was examine her fingertips for burns; a _lot_ of magic had passed through her in that fight, she’d never captured power like that and flung it back, and she’d burned herself on magic before.

Haggar – she was Altean. How was that possible? Allura knew that there had been small groups that were offworld at the time of Altea’s destruction, that there’d even been communities elsewhere, but she had no idea where they’d gone in the intervening millennia, or if they even still existed. Obviousy _some_ did, and yet…

Allura put that out of her mind for now, picking up her brush. A hundred strokes on every side, her mother had told her as a girl. After a summer spent in the Altean highlands where her hair had become a tangled mess and had been cut to make it manageable again, she always followed her mother’s advice.

The lights dimmed in her room suddenly, and a jolt traveled up her spine. _Danger, danger_ , her gut cried out – but she saw no threat, she was alone in her room on her castle. The glowing cores of her room lights dimmed again almost to black, buzzing ominously—then they brightened again, and the sensation of danger passed, and Allura released her deathgrip on her hairbrush one finger at a time and put it down.

“Coran?” she called out. “Is the castle experiencing power surges?”

“ _A few here and there, Princess, but nothing affecting propulsion or the integrity of the wormhole. Is everything all right?_ ”

Things were definitely not _all right_ , but Allura took a breath, centered herself, and replied. “The lights some of the corridors and cabins seem to be fluctuating. It’s nothing critical. Coran?”

“ _Yes, Princess?_ ”

“Please finish up anything that affects our ability to keep flying and then get some rest. I need you more than ever now…” _Now that Shiro’s gone_.

“ _I will._ ” There was a pause. “ _You did well today, Princess. I stand by what I said before_.”

She smiled, picking up her brush again. “Thank you, Coran. Allura out.”

*

Haggar stood in the hangar at the head of the honor guard arrayed in lines two deep, watching the ship slide through the magnetic field keeping atmosphere in, and kept her fingers from twitching. They were burned from her fight with the princess; the sheer amount of power that had been flowing between them had been astounding, and Haggar had thought sure she’d be able to best the Altean royal brat with the quintessence they’d drained from Voltron. But Allura had taken it in and given it back, and Haggar was paying the price now.

 _In more ways than one_ , she thought sourly as the ship landed and the ramp extended. Her call to summon the prince was the right one, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

Prince Lotor was as tall as his father, but slimmer, a product of the Altean blood in him. The Emperor had originally been disappointed in this, but after his son’s prowess with magic had come about, Zarkon had lessened his criticism. It was unfortunate, really; had Lotor not been able to back up his arrogance with actual skill and intelligence, Haggar would have found it much easier to dismiss him. Sadly, he was brilliant. She hid her scowl with a bow as he swept down the ramp and stopped before her.

“My prince,” she said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. Behind her she heard her remaining druids bow too, the rustle of their robes loud in her ears. When she straightened, Lotor was smirking at her.

“You’ve made a right mess of things, haven’t you?” he said. She dug her nails into one of the burns on her palm to keep herself from reacting poorly.

“We didn’t expect the princess to be so powerful.”

“She’s Altean. She’s a _royal_ Altean.”

“So are you.”

“Her blood is pure. You should have expected it.” He stepped around her, striding toward the hangar bay doors. “Now I have to fix it.”

“The Emperor—“

“Where _is_ he, anyway? The old fool…”

“Prince Lotor, it is not right that you—“

“I’ll say what I want about him. He was too obsessed with the Black Lion, with Voltron, and it clouded his judgment. I won’t have that same problem.”

“If you wish to see your father, my prince, I will show you to him.”

She didn’t draw even as they walked, not quite, but she was only half a step behind as they made their way to the chamber lit only by the wall sconces and the glow of the tubes attached to Emperor Zarkon, still comatose in his bed. Prince Lotor leaned over his father, examining him.

“Explain,” he commanded.

“Something happened during the battle with Voltron,” Haggar began. “We are not sure what. Some kind of feedback between the Emperor and the Black Lion and the Black Paladin, we believe. The Black Paladin… he was one of our gladiators, once.”

“Yes, the Champion, so I’ve heard. One of your little projects?”

“His arm.”

“A pity. From what I’ve read, he would have been a great asset. But it’s another mistake, and now it has cost the Empire.”

“We tried to break him, but he proved more… resilient.”

“Perhaps that’s why the Black lion accepted him over my father. Do we know what happened to him in this fight?”

“Not yet.”

“See that you find out.” Prince Lotor stepped back with one last baleful glare at his father, and led them back out of the chamber. Again Haggar found herself half-jogging to keep her place, and loathed him a little more. But Lotor was all business when they stopped just outside.

“Summon the commanders,” he commanded. “The Paladins will be weak after this battle. If we can take the advantage now, then we may yet turn this from catastrophe.”

*

He was getting _really_ tired of waking up in darkness.

Initially he tried to push himself upright, but his whole body screamed at him, so Shiro let himself lay still, breathing into the pain and breathing it out of his body, eyes half-closed. He couldn’t see anything anyway; the lights on his suit only seemed to illuminate a kind of swirling cloud of particles, and he couldn’t see his hand if he put it more than a few inches from the faceplate of his helmet. Reaching out to the place that always held the Black Lion’s strange consciousness, he only encountered a faint echo of her… mind? Presence? Whatever. The thought of being stuck alone in living darkness made panic rise in his chest, so Shiro closed his eyes again and took stock of himself and what his senses were telling him.

He lay on something hard – metal or stone, by the way his gloves dragged against it. He flexed the fingers on first his real hand, then his Galra one. Both worked, so he made smaller movements with his arms, his toes and feet and ankles, working up to his center. Sitting up was still painful, but he’d experienced worse, and now he could fully see what was going on around him. Which was… not much.

He was in some kind of corridor, shrouded in darkness. The air was full of those particles, making him feel like he was in some kind of color-reversed snowglobe; every movement kicked them up more, so he sat as still as possible while he continued looking around. Metallic floor after all, wall that he couldn’t see much of, but there was a wall sconce in a style he knew very well, and Shiro grinned through the pain even as he used the wall to lever himself up. He was in the castle, just one of the unused wings Allura and Coran hadn’t mentioned much about. There were so few of them, they’d shut some areas down to save power for more pressing matters.

That made Shiro think of Allura, of seeing fire erupt out of the castle, hoping she was safe, worried she was dead. He had the idea that he’d know if she’d died, though – she’d said before that her life force was tied to the Lions, so he thought that for sure Black would have let him know. She knew Allura was important to all of them… and how important she was to Shiro, personally.

That made it all the more critical that Shiro figure out how he’d ended up on an unused deck, and more importantly, why he hadn’t been found yet. “Guys?” he called over the comm. “Keith? Coran?” Then, when there wasn’t any response: “…Allura?”

Static. With a sigh, he cut the broadcast feature – if they hadn’t responded before they wouldn’t now – and started walking. Eventually he’d come to one of the lifts and he’d be able to get back to where everyone else was.

Something nagged at him, though; if he was just in a different part of the castle, why was his connection to his Lion so weak? Why weren’t the comms working? Why did it look not just unused, but decaying?

As he walked, Shiro noticed something else, too; the lights, usually a bright aqua, were dim. Not the usual night cycle dimming either, but something more like… what had they been called? Will o’ the wisps, ghostly suggestions of the same light he’d come to find comforting. Curious, he paused by one and reached up, resting his fingertips on the light fixture. Rather than gentle warmth, it was frigid.

Maybe this really _wasn’t_ the castle he knew.

The lifts weren’t working (and shouldn’t they have still run, even to unused levels?) so he pried open the doors and began climbing the shaft, doing his best to ignore how badly his muscles shook. _You’ve been through worse_ , he told himself. _Just gotta keep moving._

Unfortunately, prying the lift doors open on the lowest level he _knew_ to be in use didn’t help him. The decay extended up here as well, and even though he was closer to the main turbine, he couldn’t feel its vibration through the deck. Somehow, that made it even more eerie, walking through a corridor he’d just been in that day that looked as though nobody had set foot in it for a thousand years. Which presented him with another problem; if he wasn’t on _his_ Castle of Lions, just where was he? And, more importantly, how could he get back?

Shiro climbed through a few more levels. It was too silent – unsettlingly so. His footfalls didn’t seem to make any noise that his helmet’s audio sensors could detect, and anytime he pushed open a door, even the screeching of rusted metal was muffled. So when he heard the roar, loud and angry and echoing through the halls, he felt pretty justified in nearly falling over his own feet running from it. He couldn’t tell where it had come from; the sound traveled strangely through the corridors, bouncing around until he could hear it equally well no matter which way he turned, so Shiro did the best thing he could think of – he made for higher ground.

It was silly to think that going and hiding in his room could keep him safe. Whatever had made that sound, it was _big_ (or at least sounded that way) and he knew he was in no shape to face it. He scrambled up lift shafts and stairways and ran through corridors until he reached the doors of his room. They seemed rusted shut, and when he pulled at the leaves of it to pry them apart, he couldn’t. Shiro inhaled, gathered his strength, and charged up his Galra arm. The bright pink-purple energy lit the corridor with a glow that seemed not to fade away so much as _be absorbed_ by the dark particles floating around him, a sight that was more than a little disturbing. But he was able to carve a small handhold in the door, a little cut through the to the other side, and once he’d worked at it, he was able to shove the door open enough for him to wiggle through. His chest armor scraped the sides a little, but Shiro wasn’t about to leave himself at all defenseless right now.

His room had always been spare, even after all their time in space. The other paladins had collected knick-knacks, and even Keith had a few things, but Shiro hadn’t ever gotten more than what few things had caught his eye or been given to him. Usually he was too busy with other things to devote much time to picking up souvenirs, but it still gave him a pang to see his room looking so empty of anything that could have once been a personal touch.

Still, it was defensible and more comfortable than holing up anywhere else, so he shoved the door almost back to the frame, swatted clouds of the dark particles away from the bed (the mattress was rotted and black, but it still _felt_ comfortable) and slid back on it until his back hit the wall of the cubby. From here he could watch the door and the rest of the room.

Despite his bone-deep exhaustion, Shiro found that sleep didn’t come easily, and when it did, it was full of darkness and a pair of burning yellow eyes.

*

“There has been one grave weakness in our strategy thus far,” Lotor said, sitting on his father’s throne and addressing his commanders. “Single-minded focus is effective in the short term, but if my father’s Empire is to endure for another ten thousand years, we must change from his path to one with a broader vision.”

Standing with her druids, Haggar was glad her hood hid most of her face; Lotor kept glancing her way at certain points (mostly where his personal strategies diverged from the ones she had worked out with his father) but she kept her head down, and it was a minor thing to make the shadows around her face deeper so that he couldn’t see that her lip was curling in disgust. Never mind that when she’d made to take her place at the side of the throne, Lotor had hissed _know your place, witch_ and she’d had no choice but to bow and move back down, in front of the commanders.

Even more infuriating, his ideas were sound. It would be up to the commanders to execute them correctly, but Lotor was right; they still had the obvious advantage over a fledgling alliance with few members, led by an inexperienced princess and five even more inexperienced paladins. Their fleets were scattered but still powerful, and the Galra remained the dominant power in the universe. For every planet Voltron had freed in their time back in the game, the Galra added a dozen more. That was most of the reason Haggar and her few compatriots had taken up with Zarkon after the fall of Altea. She had been smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing.

More worrisome than the activities of the Castle of Lions, systems had started to hear of the return of Voltron. Out on the fringes news traveled slowly, but so did Galra patrols, and some were beginning to hear the stirring of rebellion. Regional commanders who had previously reported compliance were now being forced to put down unrest, and at times were forced to resort to stamping out protests at taking resources that had previously been given readily, if with resentment. _That_ worried Haggar, because these systems had gotten used to Zarkon’s heavy and immediate responses, and when none came, they would grow bold. It simply wasn’t the Prince’s style, and he refused to listen to her when she said it would be unwise to change things too suddenly.

 _And now he sits on the throne, when his father still draws breath_ , Haggar thought. _Presumptuous whelp._

Lotor dismissed the group of them when he had finished issuing orders. Out of habit, Haggar fell into step beside him but immediately dropped back a half-step. “My lord,” she began, “Myself and the druids—“

“—will not be necessary for some time.” Lotor stopped, turning to face her, and Haggar quickly dropped her gaze. “Particularly not with your greatest invention destroyed in a few ticks by _one girl_.”

“The komar is being repaired as we speak.”

“Then until it is finished I have no need of you. My focus is on this push, and it can be accomplished without your aid.”

“If I may be so bold, it would be well to use the powers of the druids to augment the flagships of the fleets,” she said, thinking quickly. “We are not only mystics, my lord. We have great use in battle, and if reports are to be believed, those in the field will be encountering more of them. If our presence so displeases you, then perhaps we may still be of use to the Empire away from the command ship.”

Lotor’s eyes narrowed. “I would think the druids more useful for ground assaults.”

“True. But often, the Voltron paladins have been foolish enough to mount attacks on ships in person, rather than from their lions, and despite their inexperience have managed to make away with valuable resources and intelligence. A pair of druids on a ship will be enough to protect both.”

His eyes narrowed further, and Haggar now met his gaze, holding it until Lotor nodded slowly. “I can see the merit of it,” he said slowly. “Very well. Assign your druids; I will notify the ship commanders of their new guests.”

Haggar bowed low. “Thank you, my lord,” she said, and remained bowing until he had turned the corner. When she straightened, she motioned the druids with her forward.

“We are not numerous,” one druid said. “Without all of us, repairs on the komar will be delayed for far longer than previously estimated.”

“Let me worry about the komar.” Haggar rubbed her thumb across her healing fingertips, savoring the flickers of pain. “For now I need you out in the world. Two and two, do you understand?”

“We understand,” another druid said. “We obey.”

“Good.” Haggar gave them their assignments, sent most of the remaining druids to the komar to continue their work, and took one with her to Zarkon’s chamber. He still slumbered and she knew not why; all their healing arts had been exhausted, but though his body had knit itself back together and the wounds from the fight had vanished, he did not wake.

“Watch the door,” she told the druid, and continued forward, standing by her emperor’s head. For a moment she wondered if he knew she was here, that she was trying desperately to preserve his legacy, but as her hands began to glow and she placed them on his brow, Haggar let those thoughts fade away. It wouldn’t do to introduce such ideas into his mind as she worked.

But as she probed, sending tendrils of quintessence out into his psyche to try and retrieve him, Haggar realized things were far, far worse than she had anticipated. His mind—his consciousness, everything that made Zarkon a commander worth following—was gone.

She pulled her hands back, disturbed. What in the name of the ancients had happened out there, during that fateful battle with Voltron? Haggar had felt the enormous release of power, even as she’d been fighting for her own life. Privately, then, she’d admitted that the new Black Paladin was strong, that his quintessence ran deep and powerfully, more even than she’d thought as she’d worked over his prone and scarred body. Now she cursed the day she’d ever asked Zarkon for permission to make the Champion her personal project. Unknowingly she had put him through a crucible, and he had come out reformed and powerful, and working to end her.

Somehow, it had all led to what was presented before her. A shell of a once-great emperor; an arrogant prince on the throne; a princess and a band of children, fighting an impossible foe. How to unpick the knot and make sure she didn’t fall along with everything else? The Champion was the key, she thought. But how?

Rising, Haggar left the druid to guard the chamber and went to her personal study. This would take work, and she had much to do.

*

Joxam stood at attention before Gronak, Commander of the Second Fleet. The druids beside him were restless, obviously not as schooled as their leader.

“We did not ask for a guard,” one of them said. Commander Gronak, standing on his command dais, glared at them.

“And I did not ask for druids, but I have been commanded to allow you onto my ship and to allow your powers to be used in battle, so here we are. You will adhere to my rules while you are on board, and one of them is that Joxam here is to be your guard.”

The druids turned to look at him, and Joxam kept himself steeled. After a long few moments of scrutiny, they turned back to Gronak.

“Very well,” the other druid agreed. “But he is under our command.”

Gronak waved a hand, already turning away. “As long as it’s understood that if it contradicts an order given by me, he will follow me first.”

“Vrepit sa,” the druids chorused. Gronak didn’t bother to reply, but Joxam bowed.

“Vrepit sa,” he repeated, and when the druids swept off the bridge, he followed at a respectful distance.

It took everything in him to keep from reaching for the hilt of the luxite blade, sheathed right between his shoulder blades and covered by his armor. But it would be far more helpful to his brothers and sisters in the Blade of Marmora if he let them live, kept his mouth shut and his ears open. Anything he could pass on would help them.

*

Shiro jolted upright, gasping for breath. The glow from his Galra hand lit the flurry of particles disturbed by his sudden movement, and when he looked down, he realized they’d come to rest on his limbs and body, like some kind of dark version of snow. He brushed them off his armor and stood, stretching out the soreness in his muscles and trying to banish the thought of literally drowning in darkness. His HUD chrono told him he’d been asleep for four hours; not enough after a full day’s battle, but it would have to do. He needed to explore the castle, see if there was anything he could find, anything he could use.

Shoving the door open, Shiro paused in the doorway, silent, hardly daring to breathe. There were scrape marks on the floor that hadn’t been there the night before, scrapes that looked suspiciously like they’d been made by claws. He couldn’t be sure, but Shiro had to think that whatever had roared last night had made those marks.

But he couldn’t hear or see anything, so he crept out and made his way through the castle. The decay and darkness where everywhere; rusty black tendrils creeping up the walls, fixtures he had seen in perfect working order just over a day ago now crumbling almost before his very eyes. And in the wall sconces, those pale will o’ the wisp lights, unsettling in the way they glowed but never really illuminated the way.

More unsettling, though, were the piles of scrap he found in each one of the lions’ hangars. Heaps of tarnished chrome and broken pistons, recognizable shapes picked out but no longer articulated into a cohesive whole. These piles had clearly once been the lions, and seeing them reduced to little more than suggestions of what they’d once been twisted something in Shiro’s gut. If this was… some future, or some alternate reality, he didn’t want it to ever come true. When he reached the Black lion’s hangar, he kept walking. After how close he’d gotten with his lion, Shiro wasn’t ready to see her in the same state as the others.

It was odd, he thought, climbing up another elevator shaft toward the bridge. He could still get something of an echo of his lion. It wasn’t and hadn’t ever really been a psychic connection, more of a transfer of feelings, but ever since she’d taken him to the world she’d been created on, Shiro had felt a new depth to his connection with his lion. She wasn’t exactly sapient in the same way he was, but she knew her identity and she had intelligence and she knew everything there was to know about him, which was more than he could say for anyone.

It had been freeing, really. The Black lion didn’t judge him for his insecurities, only supported him when he needed it; she didn’t fear his nightmares, only provided him a place to work out his fear. She knew his heart, and did nothing but encourage him.

Too bad he’d been too much a coward to ever act on it.

The bridge was in much the same condition as the rest of the ship, though it made him just as uneasy to see the four paladin stations rusted and crumbling, and Allura’s dais with its two control podiums covered in a thick, rippling layer of the black particles. They seemed to be flowing out away from it, though. That was good.

Shiro wandered the bridge for a few minutes. The viewports were filmy, opaque; beyond them, he could only see black. It was like the castle floated in a starless void. A coffin, and he was trapped in it. He turned away.

His station wasn’t in much better shape than the others, but Shiro still took a seat and put out his hands, and the screens flickered to life after a moment. They were pale and fuzzy with static, but they showed him the ship was completely dead; the main turbine was offline, no flight capability, minimal power but even that was slowly being depleted. He tried to run a scan with the external sensors, but every time the castle tried for a position lock the screen fuzzed even more and a low rumble shook up through the soles of his boots, so he left that for the moment and ran an internal scan. If he couldn’t see where he was in space, at least he could know what it was that had roared and wandered by his room while he slept. Nothing showed up, though. No life forms aboard, save himself.

He shut the console down, leaning on the armrest. There _had_ to be some way to get back. He’d just have to be clever enough to find it.

With one last pat to the back of his console, he turned. Allura’s command dais had always seemed like ground he couldn’t tread on, but nothing threw him back when he stepped on it, and at the brush of a hand on one of the podiums her screens crackled to life. No new information, but standing where she stood, Shiro got a sense of comfort... one that was quickly dispelled as a roar, close enough to shake the dark particles floating around him, filled the air.

His hand glowing with violet light, Shiro raced for the nearest cover – the back of Coran’s bridge station. He didn’t like having his back to the thin viewport that separated him from the vacuum of space, but there was nowhere better. Just as he slid behind the console and dimmed the glowing panels on his suit, the monster appeared, and even though he could only see its reflection in the hazy… glass? of the viewport, it was enough to chill Shiro right to his core.

He couldn’t see it clearly; the reflection wasn’t clear enough, the line of sight not wide enough, but he could see enough to know that he never, ever wanted to come face to face with this thing. It was big, its limbs long and its breathing labored as it paced the bridge. It breathed hard, hovering over his station. Shiro held his breath as he watched its reflection, eyes glowing a sickly purple, watching it sweep the bridge. It snarled in frustration and started up toward Allura’s dais—then seemed to recoil, hissing in pain, and left again.

Shiro waited until the darkness swallowed up even the sound of its movement before reemerging and walking, as quietly as he could on the toes of his boots, toward the bridge door. One last roar had him skittering back, hitting one of the wall sconces with his shoulder and causing the pale light to flicker wildly, but the beast didn’t return, and Shiro let himself breathe and turn the lights on his suit back on. They were outmatched by a strange pale glow, though, different from the wall sconces. It seemed to hover around and above Allura’s dais, and Shiro walked toward it. Putting his arm in the area of the light didn’t hurt so he stepped up onto the dais again. He felt warm, comfortable, and…

His voice was raspy from lack of use, but it sounded strong in the muted silence of the bridge.

“Allura?”

*

Midway through the night cycle, Allura accepted that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She’d tried to wear herself out as much as she could sparring with the drones, but even though her eyes burned, Allura couldn’t find peace enough to sleep.

She checked on the paladins first, overriding their door locks with her own command codes so she could make sure each one of them slept soundly in their bed. Lance’s sleep was fitful and she soothed him, and Keith too when she reached his bunk; both of them had looked up to Shiro— _did_ look up to him—and were taking his disappearance especially hard. Keith especially looked pale and drawn even in sleep, curled up tightly around a pillow. Allura thought about summoning her quintessence to turn away whatever nightmares he was probably experiencing, but decided against it. She had more power in her than she thought possible; best not to use it _on_ someone she cared about before she had a complete grasp of it. Slowing the heartbeat and cooling the body had the same effect.

They needed the paladins too, now more than ever. With Shiro gone—no, _missing in action_ , she told herself sternly—someone else would have to take up the mantle of team leader, someone else would have to take up the position in order for Voltron to continue to press their new advantage. Once word spread that Zarkon had fallen in battle, other systems that had been either neutral or under loose Galra control would want to join the Alliance, but they would need assurance of protection. Allura reset the door controls on Keith’s quarters and headed into the heart of the castle.

Perhaps what was bothering Keith was what Allura herself had surmised; he would be the natural successor to the title of Black paladin. She knew he and Shiro were exceptionally close, and Shiro had always spoken highly of Keith— _did_ speak highly of him, Stars be damned, she would have to remember not to use past tense—and of the paladins, Keith was the one Allura would choose to even make the attempt to bond with the Black lion. Hunk and Pidge were content in their roles; Lance’s bravado was a thin veil over his insecurities, which could be fatal in a pitched battle. The Black lion needed a confident leader in her chair, and Voltron’s head needed to be strong and decisive. She was not as choosy as the Red, but she knew her own mind and who would work with her. Keith had piloted her before, albeit briefly. Surely she’d accept him.

That made her next stop on her late-cycle rounds the hangar in the castle’s central tower. Allura had often passed these doors with her father, many thousands of years ago—though it didn’t _feel_ like that. To her mind, she’d seen Altea burning less than a full year ago, and not long before that, she’d seen Zarkon clasp hands with her father before heading to his lion, remembered listening to them call to each other in battle. She’d always been a little afraid of the Black lion, but the feeling when she walked back into the hangar now was more welcoming.

As before, Allura hesitated when she thought she caught the glimmer of light in the Black lion’s eyes. It was surely a trick of the light of the hangar combined with the glow of the lion’s particle barrier, but when she reached out along the connection between her quintessence and the lion’s, she felt the same thing; for whatever reason, the lion was glad she was there.

“Shiro must have rubbed off on you,” she murmured, her palm resting against the barrier. A low rumble filled the hangar, then subsided. Allura smiled, then drew in a breath. The lions communicated with the paladins mostly through a series of images, but they understood speech.

“You must know he’s missing. Possibly forever.”

A feeling of denial, not her own. Black didn’t believe Shiro was gone.

“But he’s not here.”

The same sensation, and a brief image of Shiro on the bridge. He was here, the lion was insisting, though the image seemed hazy, coming in and out of focus. Here, but not here.

“Either way, until we find him, we may need a replacement pilot for you. Keith—“

Vehement rejection, so strong it actually rocked Allura back on her heels. The Black lion wanted nothing to do with the idea, and rejected it so strongly that Allura knew—somehow, deep down in her gut—that the Black lion would never accept Keith as a pilot unless it was truly an emergency. She had done so once, when it had been necessary to save Shiro’s life, but as long as he was alive she would not abandon her paladin.

“Keith is more than a capable pilot! Shiro _wanted_ him to take his place in a situation just like this!”

She felt that the lion conceded the point (a sort of begrudging acceptance filled her mind) but the point remained that Shiro was _not_ gone, and that unless the Black lion was certain he was never coming back, she would not permanently accept anyone else for her own. Allura needed to look more closely, the lion seemed to insist, and that was accompanied by a sense of danger so profound that Allura gasped, turning away until she could contain herself.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I wish I had your faith.”

A series of images—Shiro looking to Allura for input, the echo of his voice calling out in anguish to her with the image of the central tower of the castle engulfed in flame, followed by steely resolve. Allura felt her heart constrict. Shiro did not give up on her, the lion was saying. She ought to have a little more faith in his ability to survive, but he needed her to help him.

“How do I find him?”

Nothing more came from the lion, and Allura sighed, her hand resting against the barrier. She hoped the lion knew how much she wanted Shiro to be alive, to come home. She’d need his help if they were to be successful; she’d learned tactical theory, but Shiro had practical experience.

“I’ll do my best,” she said, and was filled with a sense of gratitude as she left the hangar.

She didn’t see the wall just behind the lion distend outward, the impression of a three-clawed appendage pressing the metal outward as though it were thin fabric. The hangar door closed behind her and she made her way up to the bridge.

Pidge’s Galra finder, or Galra predictor, took a while to load up when she activated it on the bridge. Perhaps their victory had thrown its algorithm for a loop, a thought that brought a small smile to Allura’s face. Anything that hindered the Galra Empire pleased her.

It loaded, and Allura spread her arms, zooming in on the section of the star map where Zarkon’s main fleet had begun to regroup. Another large blinking icon had come alongside the one representing his command ship, and Allura tapped it, her eyes narrowing as she realized who it belonged to. She’d hoped he’d died in the intervening ten thousand years, but it seemed her luck didn’t extend that far. If Lotor was in the game now, she would have to change her approach.

As she worked, running simulations and projecting Galra fleet strengths throughout the universe, an electric buzz caught her ear. One of the bridge lights was fuzzing out, dimming and brightening almost to overload, then dimming again. Allura’s brows drew together in confusion; the repairs weren’t finished, but if this was a power surge, _all_ the lights on the bridge would have been affected. Leaving her dais, Allura went over to the flickering light, watching it dim and brighten, dim and brighten.

The voice came, so faint she’d have thought she was imagining it.

“... _Allura?_ ”

She spun, heart racing. “Shiro?” Allura called out, heart racing, breath coming quick as she scanned the bridge. “Shiro, is that you?”

No response came, either over the comm or in the room, and though she searched thoroughly neither Shiro’s bio-signature or his suit’s signal appeared on her screens. Allura sighed, running a hand over her face. Wishful thinking, not aided by the Black lion’s use of the image of Shiro on the bridge.

But she’d heard his voice.

The light on the bridge was steady again, and the bridge was silent in the way of ships at late-cycle hours, but Allura set her jaw and called up her screens again, pulling up the archival information stored in the castle’s computer. There _had_ to be something there for her to work with, something she could use to find her paladin.

*

When he was sure that the monster had gone, Shiro crept away from the bridge – despite its lack of cover, he felt safe there – and back out into the rest of the castle. It was slow going with him stopping to listen every few hundred feet, but he eventually reached where he wanted to go. There was no way he’d be able to get the huge bay door into the Black lion’s hangar open, but there was a smaller access hatch off to the side, and he was able to wrench it away with his Galra hand and crawl through.

Logically, Shiro knew that the lions were mechanical, that just like humans they’d eventually grow old if not maintained, if parts weren’t fixed or replaced, if they weren’t healed by whatever magical means were available. But even knowing that wasn’t enough when he kicked out the wall panel on the other side and stood up in the cold, dim hangar, looking for a lion and seeing instead a pile of metal scrap and tarnished gold. For a moment Shiro couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe; his heart beat painfully in his chest, seeing what had become of his partner in this strange adventure. Walking around it, he found a piece that he knew was part of the eye assembly, an arched piece of metal with glow panels long since dimmed and clouded over, and pressed his hand to it.

“What happened to you, girl?” he whispered. “What has this place done to you?”

There was another pile that looked to have once been one of the lion’s big metal paws, and Shiro climbed up onto it, resting his elbows on his knees. As many times as he told himself that this was some dark and distant future, some echo of reality like the plane where he’d fought Zarkon before, it was hard for him to think that this could be what happened to his lion. Even now he could still feel an echo of her in the back of his mind – the bond was still there, strong and resonant, but it was like he was shouting down a long tunnel and she was shouting back.

That brought his thoughts around to what had happened on the bridge, after the monster had left. The glow around the dais, the echo of Allura’s voice… had _she_ been there, somehow? Or was it just a remnant of her? Shiro didn’t want to think that Allura would be a ghost in whatever world this was. He didn’t want to think about her dying at _all_ , but here in the dark, it was easy to think about the stories of spirits that his _baa_ _-_ _chan_ had told him, old and vengeful, sad and distant.

Perhaps he really _had_ died, Shiro thought. Perhaps _he_ was the ghost.

If he was a ghost, then surely that meant that he would be able to connect with some… some _ghostly_ version of his lion. At least then he wouldn’t be alone in this place. He’d have someone other than a monster for company. Closing his eyes, Shiro leaned back on his palms. He could feel the place where the Black lion usually was, and reached out to it, to that feeling he’d gotten in battle where the line between his consciousness and the strange mechanical mind of the lion had been blurred. Everything else fell away when he did that, reaching out to pluck at the bond, and feeling something—feeling his lion reaching back.

Then he was flying through the air, the side of his body singing in pain as he hit the edge of the scrap pile and bounced, scattering pieces of metal and gears as he skidded across the tarnished floor of the hangar, coming to a stop against the wall. Atop what had once been the Black lion, the monster – bigger and more terrifying now that he was face to face with it in reality – planted its paws and roared again, the noise loud enough to rattle the scrap on the floor around him. Its purple eyes, so strangely familiar, glared balefully at him as Shiro scrambled to his feet, pushing the pain down and away as his hand glowed purple in response. The monster stood between him and his way out, and he wasn’t about to let himself fall.

The monster lunged and Shiro darted to the side, dropping into a roll. It was big; he could use that, hope that it was too slow to keep up with him. The hangar was big too, and he was tired, but adrenaline surged through his veins now. The monster shrieked behind him, a deeply chilling sound.

It was more agile than he thought; instead of hitting the wall it got its feet sorted and used it to launch at him, and Shiro had to change direction abruptly, going back the way he came. He wasn’t quite fast enough—the monster caught the back of his armor and he cried out, gritting his teeth as his back hit the ground at an awkward angle, the jetpack making him arch up. Above him, the monster shrieked again and made to slam its front claws down into his chest. Shiro got his hand up in time and the resulting pained howl made his teeth rattle in his skull, a deeply unsettling feeling as he clenched his teeth and activated his jetpack, shooting out from under the monster and coming up behind it.

It turned and those eyes were on him again, shining up as he hovered in midair. Something about them was _definitely_ familiar, and seemed far too intelligent for something that acted like _just_ a monster.

 _What_ are _you?_ Shiro thought—then had to hurriedly dodge to the side when the monster gathered itself and sprang up into the air, its sharp claws reaching for him. One passed so close he could almost feel the air as it rushed by—then he had turned over and shot for the access hatch he’d come in through, landing in a stumble and falling through. As soon as he was back out in the chamber outside the lion’s bay he was running, ignoring the pain in his side. Behind him he heard the rending of metal, and glanced back to see the monster had _torn through_ the bay doors and was following him, gaining quickly.

There wasn’t room to activate his jetpack in the corridor he’d run into, and his boots slipped on the floor, sending him sprawling. Then the monster was on him, swatting him down the corridor like he was some kind of doll. When he came to a stop he groaned, forcing himself to his feet just in time to block the monster’s claws from swiping at him. It was howling in rage, its claws driving him back and back until his back hit the wall. When the beast struck at him, Shiro blocked it with his shield, then lashed out with his hand. It sunk deep into the monster’s flesh, and the howl of pain split his head in two, amplified through the helmet speakers. Shiro ground his teeth and struck again, jabbing this time for the throat. The monster dodged though, reeling back, and that was all the room he needed to duck under one of its front limbs and make his escape.

Behind him he could still hear the monster howling, could hear it thrashing around as he made for the pod bay. There was no way he could stay on this ship with that thing, _no quiznaking way_.

When he got to the pods, though, he found they were all in the same state as the Black lion; piles of metal, and the one that was in relatively good shape had a rusted-out hole through the cockpit shield. So he wasn’t getting out _this_ way; fine. Shiro had escaped worse situations under worse odds.

With all his adrenaline draining away, Shiro felt every one of his wounds from his fight. But he still took the trek back to the paladin barracks at a jog, not wanting to chance it. Only when the door was securely closed behind him could he relax.

*

“So. _So_.”

Keith closed his eyes and counted to five in his head. Lance had been withdrawn for the last few days and it had been… unsettling, to say the least, seeing him so pale and quiet. But it seemed he was getting back to his normal self, and Keith wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “Yes, Lance, what is it?”

“Are you gonna lead the team now that Shiro’s gone?”

The question hit him hard, and Keith set down the spoon-like utensil (it was almost but _not quite_ a spoon, but definitely _not_ a spork) he’d been using to eat his goo. Hunk hadn’t had the heart to cook anything, and Keith had survived on MREs out in the desert for a year before they’d blasted off that fateful day, but he’d gotten used to his friend’s cooking. It felt like one more thing that had been thrown out of whack by his friend’s disappearance.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it’ll be up to Allura and the lions. I mean, the leader of Voltron’s always in the Black lion, right? I’ve piloted her before, but I don’t know if the Black lion will accept me permanently.”

In the part of his mind reserved for Red, he felt her displeasure at the very thought. Red was possessive of him, and the idea that he’d leave her to go to another lion upset her greatly. But if it came down to it, Keith thought he might not have much of a choice.

Red pulled back at that thought, sulking in a corner of his mind. Keith sighed and resumed poking at his goo.

“I think it should be you,” Lance murmured. _That_ startled Keith.

“You aren’t gonna argue with me for it?”

“Nope. I could never leave Blue, she n’ me are like _this_.” He held up two fingers, twined together, then leaned back in his chair, smirking at Keith. “Besides, if I let you go first everyone will be so disgusted they’re gonna _beg_ me to take over.”

He scowled and rolled his eyes, as much a legitimate reaction as one to hide a smile. As annoyed as he was, a part of Keith was glad to see Lance was getting back to himself. He much preferred boisterous-façade Lance to quiet, sad Lance, if only because he knew how to deal with the former.

Their quarters were close together, so when Keith had given up on his bowl of goo and cleaned up, they made their way back through the corridor. Halfway there, Keith got an itch in his skull, one he knew all too well when Lance was around. _Don’t start talking_ , he thought desperately, enjoying the calm. _Don’t start, don’t—_

“Where do you think he went, anyway?”

“Who, Shiro?”

“Who _else_ has disappeared mysteriously lately?”

Keith scowled at him, but shrugged. “Maybe something happened between him and Zarkon that made him just… vanish.”

“It doesn’t seem right that a guy like Shiro would go like that, though. Y’know? He deserved a better end.”

“He didn’t deserve an end at _all_.”

“Well, no, he didn’t. But I’m just saying.”

“Can we talk about something else, _please_?”

“Sure, I mean—hey, what’s that?”

“Lance,” Keith muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose as they turned down the corridor their rooms were on. “I really am _not_ in the mood for some _game_ —“

“No, I’m serious, I mean, what’s _that_?”

Lance grabbed his arm and pointed, and Keith looked up. The lights, usually glowing their steady blue, were flickering wildly.

“That’s weird,” Keith said. It sounded dumb.

“D’you think it’s a power surge?” Lance asked. He still held Keith’s arm, but his grip was tighter than it needed to be. “I mean, Coran and Slav have been working hard, but maybe they missed something—woah!”

As they watched, all the lights went out, leaving only the dim glow of emergency lighting from the lift lobby. Then the lights nearest them, on either side of the corridor, blinked on. Then the next pair, and the next, and the next. Lance let go of his arm to jog after them, and after a moment of debate Keith followed.

The lights had gone out all the way to the end of the corridor, near Shiro’s room; now the lights on either side of his door lit up almost to blinding, then burst. Acrid smoke filled the air.

“Oh my god,” Lance moaned. “The castle’s haunted again. It’s haunted and Shiro is the one haunting it and _we are all going to die_ _—“_

“Lance, shut _up_.” Keith groped in a pocket for his comm unit. “Hey, Princess Allura? There’s something down here you may want to see.”

*

Allura stared down the hallway, her arms crossed. On one side of her Lance shifted from foot to foot, clearly very rattled; on her other side Keith was still, but she could almost feel the tension coming off him in waves.

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be looking at,” she said at last. Lance threw up his hands.

“It’s _haunted_ ,” he said. “I saw it and Keith saw it.”

“I don’t think it’s a _ghost_ , Lance.”

“I do! It’s Shiro’s _ghost_ , and he’s haunting us for not saving him!”

Allura put up her hands to stop either of them from talking, ignoring the twang in her heart at the thought of Shiro’s spirit, restless and doomed to wander these halls forever. Alteans had their own superstitions, much as she surmised those of Earth did. “I’m having Coran check for lingering power surges and electrical issues right now, and he’s got Slav and Pidge helping him. If something’s wrong with the castle, we’ll find it. I need you both to _calm down_ —“

That, of course, set them both off. _I should have seen this coming,_ Allura thought to herself crossly.

“It’s _Shiro_ , Princess, and even if it _isn’t_ the castle is full of _ghosts_ —“

“—we both saw it, how can you just dismiss—“

“—just a castle full of _ghost boys_ —“

“—and if it _is_ him, Princess, we have to figure out what’s going on, because he’s _not dead—_ “

“ _Enough!_ ”

Both of them _finally_ stopped at her outburst, Keith sullen, Lance perhaps a little more afraid. Allura sighed, taking a few breaths to stop, think, focus. As much as she cared for her paladins, they really did get to be too much sometimes, and as of late she felt wrung out all the time.

“The lights stopped at Shiro’s room, you said.”

“They’re burnt out.” Lance led the way; sure enough, the two sconces to either side of Shiro’s door were blackened, and if she sniffed the faintest acrid smell lingered on the air, not yet eradicated by the castle’s air recyclers. “But it was like the lights were leading us here. They were trying to tell us something about Shiro.”

“Do you think it’s… really… I mean…” Keith trailed off, but Allura caught him touching the hilt of his knife, a nervous habit. She didn’t think even he was aware he did it.

“I don’t know.” Allura rested her fingertips just at the top of the access panel, not quite ready to step past this threshold. “I will see what I can find. Why don’t you go see if Coran and Slav need anything from you?”

Both paladins got a sour look on their faces. “I think they’ve got it locked down,” Keith muttered, but at another look from her, he shrugged, and both of them left again, and she was alone.

With a deep breath, Allura faced the door. It wasn’t necessarily on the way to her rooms, the paladin barracks, but she had to admit that she sometimes made the circuit late at night, checking to see the different lights above their doors lit, green and yellow, red and blue and purple. Some nights she hesitated outside, looking up at the purple light. She always kept walking in the end.

The access panel beeped in acknowledgment and Allura stepped inside Shiro’s room. It was tidy, but here and there were little things, touches of the man who had… _did_ … occupy the room. A few trinkets on a shelf near the bed had fallen off probably during the ship’s last battle, a folded spare set of clothes, the pillow dented where he’d been laying on it and the sheets rumpled just a little. Allura touched them with her fingertips.

A buzzing sound caught her attention, and she bent to look at the roof of the cubby the bed was in. There were glow panels there, in case the occupant wanted to read or needed light. One of them, all the way in the back, was flickering, dimming and then brightening rhythmically, almost like…

Almost like someone breathing.

Allura climbed onto the mattress, sitting facing the flickering panel, and gingerly passed her arm through the space around it. No resistance, nothing out of the ordinary. So.

“Shiro?” she asked, and held her breath.

The glow panel dimmed for a long time, then flashed once, brightly, and it was so _foolish_ to hope but Allura couldn’t help it. She smiled, her heart beginning to lift.

“If it is you,” she said. “The old code. Once for yes, twice for no. Do you understand?”

The panel dimmed, then went bright for a few moments, then dimmed. Now she _let_ herself feel the relief, her hands fisted in the blankets she sat on.

“Are you all right?” The light flickered twice in quick succession. Allura inhaled, then let it out.

“Injuries?” One flicker. “From the battle?” Two flickers.

“It’s safe where you are?” A long pause, then two flickers. No, she supposed, it wouldn’t be safe wherever he was. Provided she wasn’t going completely mad, of course.

“Do you know how you got there?” Two flickers.

“Are you alone?” Two flickers.

“Who’s with—no, not a yes or no question.” Allura took a deep breath. “Shiro… do you think you’re alive?”

The panel was dark for so long Allura began to worry that she’d get nothing else out of it, but just when she was about to give up, the panel lit up once, so strong and steady that she exhaled slowly, smiling.

“I’m glad,” she said. “It would be quite dull without you, corporeal or not.”

The light flickered once. Allura thought of a few more things she could ask, but set them aside for now. She had a task to complete now.

“Do you trust me when I say that I’m going to do everything I can to find a way to help you?”

The flash of light was almost immediate, and Allura shook her head, her smile softening. “Of course. Be safe, Shiro, will you do that for me?”

When she got the flicker of light she wanted, she slid off the bed, touched the pillow one last time, and was about to leave the room when several things happened at once; the castle rocked under her feet, throwing her back against the wall, and her earrings flashed, Hunk and Pidge’s voice shrill and panicked in the comms.

“— _it’s huge, it’s gonna eat all of us, oh my_ god _—“_

“— _was stretching out the wall like it was putty or latex or oh god I don’t know what but it’s huge and it’s in the walls—“_

A moment later Coran added to the cacophony. “ _Princess, you must get back to the bridge immediately!_ ”

One hand on the wall, Allura took a few steps, then began jogging as the castle rocked again, throwing herself into the lift and slapping her palm on the controls. “What’s going on?”

“ _It’s the Galra! We’re under attack!”_

“ _There’s a quiznaking monster and it’s loose on the ship—_ “

Allura’s ears filled with six different voices until she shouted _“Enough!_ ” When everyone had quieted, she continued.

“I’m on my way to the bridge. Does someone— _one person at a time_ —want to tell me what’s going on and why Hunk is yelling about a monster?

There was silence for a moment longer, then Pidge sighed.

“ _Coran sent us to the black lion’s hangar to investigate a sensor anomaly_ ,” she said. “ _He was worried it’d be some Galra stowaway – not like the Blade of Marmora, a bad one – but if it wasn’t he wanted us to find what was causing it. And, uh—_ “

“ _It was a monster--!_ ”

“ _Hunk she said_ one at a time _—“_ Pidge made a sound of annoyance. “ _It was a monster. It…_ _stretched_ _out the wall_.”

“Well—is it still loose?” Allura waved her hand and a series of screens appeared, an internal life signs scan and security footage of the black lion’s hangar. There did seem to be some kind of weird stain on one of the walls, but she saw no creature, and there were no strange life signs on board. “I don’t see anything.”

“ _It vanished_.”

“It _what?_ ”

The lift doors opened on the bridge and Allura jogged to her dais, the two pedestals rising to her palms as the ship rocked again. “Pidge, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to tell me the rest when we’re out of this,” she said. “Get to your lions, Paladins, the castle needs you to defend it while we prepare for a wormhole jump!”

There was a pause before Keith said, “ _Princess, do you want me to…_ ”

Her heart stopped. She hadn’t really thought of it, but… “To the Black lion, Keith. We won’t be able to form Voltron, but we should be able to repel our attackers.”

*

Haggar watched the screens as the sector fleet converged on the castle’s position. Her fingers had healed to the point where clenching them brought her no pain, nothing to distract her from her annoyance. Still, she kept her tongue. It was worth more than her head to see the castle destroyed and the Altean princess captured.

“Remember,” Lotor said over the comm channel to Commander Gronak, “I don’t share my father’s obsessions. The lions can be destroyed, the paladins killed, the castle disabled. Just ensure that Princess Allura is brought to me alive.”

At least _that_ was something they could both agree on, though Haggar suspected her reasons were different than Lotor’s. The princess should not have been able to do what she’d done in the komar, flinging Haggar’s own magic back at her. Haggar intended to find out how she’d done it, and more importantly, what else she’d been keeping back.

“And here they come,” Lotor muttered, as three of the lions appeared on the screen. “Let’s end this quickly, shall we, Gronak?"

Explosions lit the screens, and on the feed from the bridge of Gronak’s ship showed it shuddering as the three lions pummeled it. Haggar watched as her druids made themselves useful, their fingertips pressed to the glass, purple bolts of magic shooting outward and forcing the lions to break off their attack.

“My lord,” Haggar said, “Perhaps it would be best to hold the castle here until we can collect more of our fleets—“

“I think we already have the advantage, don’t you, Haggar?” Lotor leaned back on the throne, gesturing at the screens. “Tell me. Surely you see what’s missing.”

“I… I’m not sure I—“

“Don’t play coy with me, I know you’re far more intelligent than you seem. Look at the field and tell me what’s missing.”

Once she saw it, of course, it was difficult to know how she’d _missed_ it. The lions buzzed around their fleet, the castle fired off its weapons, but two very important pieces were missing from the board.

 _Where_ , she wondered, _Are the_ _B_ _lack and_ _R_ _ed lions?_

*

“Come _on_!” Keith shouted, banging his fist on the particle barrier the black lion had put up around herself. “I need you to let me in!”

A deep growl resounded through the hangar, and the twin responses of Red’s displeasure in his head and the distant sounds of her stomping around in her hangar reverberated all through him. Everything seemed to scream that what he was trying to do was _wrong_ , but…

“Please,” he begged. Black’s eyes flashed, but she didn’t move, and Keith scowled as he started pacing in front of the barrier. “Princess? It’s not working, Black isn’t letting me in. Can’t you do something? Aren’t the lions linked to your quintessence?”

“ _I can’t force them to do anything they don’t want to do, Keith. You have to convince her to take you as pilot, otherwise we’re done for!_ ”

“I don’t know if I can do that with the Galra out _there_ and Red tearing things apart in her hangar in _here!_ ”

“ _Have you tried?_ ”

“Of _course_ I’ve tried!” A rumble that definitely wasn’t from a Galra blast hitting the ship vibrated up through his boots, and Keith looked up at the Black lion. “She doesn’t want me.”

“ _Keith, we need you out there leading the team, it’s what Shiro wants._ ”

“I know, but…” Keith shook his head. “I can’t do it, if it was going to happen it would have. I can do more good in Red, out there, with the others.”

“ _Keith_ …” Allura sighed. “ _Go. We’ll try again another time._ ”

When he got to Red’s hangar he wasn’t surprised to see the walls were scraped and scorched, the consoles smashed beyond repair. As soon as he stepped inside Red turned to glare at him, a deep growl filling the air and his mind. She sat, her particle barrier materializing around her.

“Not you too,” Keith groaned. “Look, I’m _sorry_ , okay? The team needs someone in the Black lion and Shiro wanted it to be me, but she didn’t let me, so—“

Red’s eyes flashed, and Keith, hopefully correctly, interpreted the flood of images and feelings she sent. “I know she thinks he’s not gone _now_. I didn’t know then. Black’s his, until the end, and I’m yours until the end. But right now, they need us out there more. So you can be mad at me, that’s fine, but we have to go get the job done. Okay?”

He held his breath; for the longest time the feeling of acceptance and affection from Red was one of the first things that had made him feel like he could leave the desert behind, and in the face of finding out that he was some part Galra, the fact she was still more than willing to accept him, just as he was, had sustained him. If he lost that now, when he’d already lost Shiro…

Finally he felt her relent. With one last growl, as if to say that this wasn’t over, the particle barrier fell and she bent, opening her mouth to let him in. Keith ran his hand along the wall as he walked up, hoping that she could sense just how grateful he was as he dropped into the pilot’s seat.

“Thank you,” he whispered, caressing the console in front of him. Red made another sound, a very skeptical one, but responded well enough to his controls.

Not a moment too soon, he thought as he flew out into the fray. The other three were holding their own, but it was clear they were outmatched. Every time they’d taken on a Galra fleet before they’d been able to form Voltron, or at least had all five lions in play. Now…

“ _Good to see you, buddy_ ,” Lance said, and Blue dropped in to fly alongside Red briefly. Keith imagined that he could see Lance in his cockpit, looking over at Red. “ _Sorry it didn’t work out_.”

“This is where I belong anyway.” Keith gripped the control yokes in his hands. “Let’s see what we can do with four of us, yeah?”

*

Haggar looked up at Lotor as a new icon, blinking red, joined the field; feeds from the command ship showed the Red lion darting around the field, bursts of light from its mouth tearing holes in the sides of ships, incinerating drone fighters. “It would seem the Red lion is still in play.”

Lotor didn’t seem concerned. “The Black lion still hasn’t made her appearance. Wait and see, Haggar.”

*

The ship rocked under her, and Allura slapped her hands down on the pedestals to keep from flying off her dais. “Damage report!”

Coran’s screens were all blinking red, even more alarming than her own displays. “Our particle barrier’s down to thirty percent, Princess!”

“Have Slav try and boost the power. We’re not—we can’t form Voltron so we have to support the paladins more than usual.” She clenched her jaw and sent the ship into a twisting dive to avoid a salvo from one of the ships in the Galra fleet, then brought them back up steeply so that they could use their weapons to cover Pidge as she and the Green lion took one of the big ion cannons out of commission. The druids on the flagship were making it all difficult, a wild card Allura hadn’t expected. From what little she’d seen, she’d have thought that Haggar would want to keep her minions close.

 _No time to think about that_. “Pidge, are you all right?”

“ _I’m fine, so’s Green—we’re taking a beating out here, Princess!_ ”

“You’re doing incredible.” Allura fired off a blast and watched as the upper levels of the ship—the ones where the bridge and command areas were located—exploded outward into space, wreckage twisting in zero-g. “I know it’s hard without Shiro and the Black lion, but—“

“ _It’s going to be next to impossible_ ,” Keith cut in. Allura watched on one of the screens as the Red lion shot forward, using the wreckage of another destroyed Galra ship as a way to shake his drone pursuit. “ _They’ve got half the fleet hanging back, the druids—_ “

“They’ve never come out like this before,” Coran said. He’d gotten Slav’s attention redirected onto boosting power to the shields, and Allura sighed as the meter for the particle barrier ticked back up to hover at fifty percent. Not good, but it would have to hold. She took them through another series of evasive maneuvers.

“We can talk about it later—paladins, if you hit the commander’s ship, maybe it’ll throw the rest of the fleet into chaos.”

“ _We’ll give it a try_.” On the screens, the Red lion broke free, and Allura kept them back for a minute as the fleet became occupied with trying to block the progress of the lions. Though they called out to each other over the comms, she could hear the hesitation. They were used to looking to Shiro for commands, and Keith was doing his best, she could tell, but…

Red shot out ahead of the others, outpacing Lance, who had dropped down to protect his flank. Lance’s shout of protest filled her ears.

“ _Keith! You can’t just leave me behind like that!_ ”

“ _Then keep up!_ ”

Behind them, Hunk and Pidge had been waylaid and were now arcing up away from Lance and Keith, each one of them with a tail of Galra drone fighters. Allura watched Pidge do some fancy flying to get to where she could pick off the ones behind Hunk with her lion, but they were far behind the other two by now.

“Hold on, Pidge, I’m moving to cover you,” she said, but as soon as she moved the castle closer they started taking fire from the larger ships, and she had no choice but to move back out of range again, snarling in frustration as she took shots to try and clear a path for Hunk and Pidge to get back to the other two paladins, and she watched the green and yellow icons loop back into the fray. At least they seemed to have things under control; Lance was clearly frustrated, and he was getting sloppy because of it. One of the blasts from a druid hit Blue’s hindquarters, sending Lance spinning away from the commander’s ship. Keith hadn’t noticed and was busy blasting away at the upper levels of the ship, and only Pidge yelling over the comm that they were all in _deep trouble_ got him to break off.

“ _What are you all doing?_ ”

“ _We’re trying not to_ die! _”_

Explosions filled her screen and shouts of surprise and pain filled her ears, and Allura’s gut twisted. They were all doing the best they could, but they were outgunned, outnumbered by far, and they were going to get _killed_ if something didn’t happen in the next few ticks to stop it. She couldn’t have that on her hands, not now, not with everything else.

“Coran,” she said slowly, taking her hands off the pedestals and stepping down from the dais. “You take the bridge. Keep an eye on the shields, see what Slav can do. Support us where you can but don’t be reckless.”

“Princess?”

“I have to help the paladins,” she said, and her voice was calm and level despite that she could feel her hands shaking already. “I have to at least _try_. They’re…”

She shook her head and went to Shiro’s console. It sprang to life at her touch, and with one last apologetic look at Coran’s shocked face, she thumbed the button that would take her down to Black’s hangar.

The hangar bay was dark and cool when she reached it, and belatedly Allura remembered that there had been, apparently, some sort of creature in here earlier. Across from her, behind Black crouched inside her particle barrier, was the dark smudge she’d seen on the wall. But nothing jumped out at her, so Allura took a breath and put her hand on the barrier.

“I know you wouldn’t have Keith pilot you, and I’m certainly not Shiro, but… they need you out there, and I am the only one who can do this,” she said. Black’s eyes glinted, and she felt a pressure against her skull, but the barrier didn’t drop. She didn’t move, though, focusing her resolve. Her paladins needed her.

“I’m not Shiro,” she said, more quietly. “But I know now he is alive, somewhere, and you were right. But the universe doesn’t stop needing Voltron. I will bring him home, I promise you, but the other paladins need you _now_.” She closed her eyes, letting her need to help her friends fill her heart and mind, her respect for the lion’s wishes woven through, and hoped it was enough. After a long pause, the lion rumbled, and the particle barrier dropped with a sense of acceptance. Black saw the need, and saw her conviction, and when she dropped down to allow Allura access, Allura took a moment to press her palms to the cool metal wall, resting her forehead against it.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

Then she was climbing up into the cockpit. Black had slid the seat back for her, and Allura had to try and put thoughts of Shiro out of her mind as she sat in it, her hands rising to the controls.

As they launched, Black filled Allura’s mind with images, feelings, scraps of thoughts; the elation she had felt having Shiro at her controls, the respect with which he’d treated her from the beginning, the willingness to see and acceptance of her past. And the weight of every thought in his mind, every time he’d sat in the chair she occupied.

 _Be mindful of your promises_ , the lion seemed to say.

With a shout, Allura pushed the yokes all the way forward and Black shot toward the battle, roaring her arrival. Like an echo, Allura got a sense of the other four roaring back, pleased to see their leader, and throttled back as she cruised on a plane above where the command ship had been engaged. The druids were still firing off bolts of magic, and Black helped her dodge them, then brought up a control screen with her weaponry complement. Allura touched the control for the jawblade, and as it formed, brought them in along the long pylon connecting the forward section of the commander’s ship to the aft, then spiraled along its length, the edge of the blade dug into the hull.

“ _Who’s flying the Black lion_?” Hunk asked, then gasped. “ _It’s not—Allura, is that you?_ ”

“It’s definitely _not_ Coran.” Allura felt herself pressed back into the seat as Black accelerated away from the ship, dodging bolts of magic. “We’ll talk later. For now, we need to truly neutralize this ship.”

As the paladins formed up behind her, new resolve strengthening their actions, Allura wondered if this was what Shiro felt every time he went out into battle. It was exhilarating, and even as she pushed the controls forward and felt Black accelerate toward the command ship, dodging bolts of magic along the way, she could feel the connection to the others through her connection to the lion, tenuous and new as it was. Their confidence was growing, and so was hers.

With the five of them harrying the ship the attacks on them became more sporadic, but also more desperately powerful. Whoever was in charge was determined _not_ to lose, and with the druids’ help, they were keeping the fleet together for far longer than Allura would have liked. They needed to end this now, or at least fight to a draw and retreat somewhere to make repairs.

 _We need Voltron,_ Allura thought, and apprehension filled her, because while piloting a lion was one thing – even when it was the Black lion – linking together so closely with the others with no practice and no training was something completely different. She didn’t know them like Shiro knew them, not this way, not in the way he’d needed to in order to balance four other minds alongside his own.

Black rumbled, the vibrations shivering up through the seat and her hands. _We all do what we have to_ was as close a translation as the flood of images and feelings that Allura got. They had no choice, and Black was willing, but Allura had to believe it was possible too. She took a breath.

“We need to finish this quickly!” she shouted over the comm, glad her voice didn’t shake. “Let’s form Voltron!”

It was an unusual sensation. Allura wasn’t a stranger to mental linkage, but this was more than something on the level of the mice, or the empathic connection to the lions. Suddenly there were the emotions of four other people in her mind, and she gasped, watching as systems came online as each lion connected to form parts of a whole, and when it was done, she had to take half a moment to adjust, her knuckles pale with how hard she was gripping the controls.

“ _If we take out the bridge it’ll take out the druids,”_ Keith said. He sounded oddly relieved. “ _I’m ready when you are, Princess Allura_.”

“I’m ready,” she said, and tapped her thigh to make the black bayard appear in her hand. “Let’s do this!”

She _knew_ instinctively when Keith connected his bayard, and felt the ghostly impressions of every one of the paladins slamming their controls forward with her. Voltron shot forward, the sword forming in its hand as it went. Allura watched the gauges on the screen count down the seconds to impact, waiting, waiting, _waiting_ —

_Now._

She brought the other control forward and watched as the sword buried itself deep into the aft portion of the ship, where the bridge was. Without thinking, Allura thrust the bayard into its dock, and flames lit along the blade. The ship’s engines blew with the added heat, and Allura hurriedly pulled back the controls along with Lance and Hunk, propelling them backward as explosion after explosion bloomed along the ship, spewing debris out into the void.

“Good work!” she called out, breathing hard. “Let’s head home.”

They broke apart, and her head felt significantly less full as she turned Black for the castle, leaving the Galra fleet behind them in disarray and letting the other four lions get ahead of her so she could visually check them for damage. It was something Black had shown Shiro doing, and Allura liked the idea. She slid her fingertips along the control console in thanks.

As if in response – or perhaps of the lion’s own volition, she couldn’t be sure – a new set of emotions flooded her. This, she surmised, must be what Shiro felt when coming back to the castle from a fight, from _every_ fight, all of them layered one on top of the other. Fear, when the battle hadn’t gone well; elation when it had. A thousand different emotions, but through all of them, so deep down she almost missed it, was—

Allura slapped a hand over her mouth, her wide-eyed reflection staring back at her as Black cut her speed to cruise into her hangar bay. Shiro had always looked forward to coming back to the castle because _she_ was there, and he’d been able to protect her and help her. Coming back meant that they were all alive, but mostly it meant that _she_ was. Much like when Allura had picked up the thread, once he’d realized it was there, he hadn’t been able to ignore it.

Black also brought something else to the fore as she settled down on her paws: Shiro had always swiftly put those emotions back under wraps, pushing them deep down. He’d never thought it appropriate to have them at all, but when he couldn’t deny them, he did his best to set them aside. There was a complicated mass of reasons why that Allura couldn’t parse (and part of her wanted to hear Shiro explain them himself) but it all ended with Shiro just glad that he and the other paladins had survived, that the castle was in one piece, that their mission could continue.

Black purred, apparently pleased she’d finally gotten the message. _Now you know why it is so important to bring him back_ she seemed to say. Allura took a breath, pushed the seat back, and stood.

“It was always important,” she said. “But now it’s a necessity.”

*

“Coran, what’s our status?” she asked as she made her way to the lift that would take her back to the bridge, trying to will her hands to stop shaking. “How did the castle hold up?”

“ _We’ve sustained some pretty significant damage, Princess_.” In the background she heard Slav yelling something indistinctly. “ _Slav says that we’ll need to find a place to land to make really effective long-term repairs, and I’ve found a planet, uninhabited and not Galra-controlled. We should be safe there_.”

“Send the coordinates to my station.”

A flood of voices and noise greeted her as soon as she reappeared, with all four paladins still in their armor and rushing over, speaking over each other and in some cases pushing each other out of the way. Allura barreled through them, reaching through the control crystal to the teludav systems as soon as she was on her dais. The castle made a swift turn (and maybe she didn’t crank up the inertial dampeners and made everyone slide back a little, clutching for something to hold onto) and shot into the wormhole, leaving the site of the battle far behind.

*

Lotor was silent for a long time after the bridge feed dissolved into static, long enough for the other commanders in the room to shuffle their feet and look between each other. Haggar didn’t move or speak. She had long ago learned the value of watching.

Finally, the prince stood. “Did we intercept any of their communications?”

One of the subcommanders stepped forward. “We got most of them, my lord,” she replied. “I’ll have them analyzed and the results sent to you immediately.”

“See that you do, and begin calculating trajectories and possible destinations for the castle. But I think we’ve already learned something incredibly valuable: whoever was piloting the Black lion was not its paladin.”

*

Shiro had turned his HUD chrono off before he’d finally dropped into a restless sleep. The difference between the numbers when he woke up versus when he had closed his eyes was always a depressingly small one, and rather than cause himself more mental stress with the constant reminder that he wasn’t getting enough sleep or _any_ nutrition, he preferred to go by his own instincts.

He stayed still for a long time, occasionally waving his hand to clear the airborne particles away. They always seemed to be threatening to swallow him, if he didn’t move, but Shiro would rather be neck-deep in them than face that beast from the hangar again. When he was certain he heard nothing, he crept out of the room. Food and water were necessities, even if he didn’t feel either hungry or thirsty and hadn’t for however long he’d been here.

Talking with Allura – well, communicating, really, but still, the first outside contact he’d had in days – had given him more energy. Her voice had been echoing, distant, but he’d always be able to hear her no matter how far apart they were, he supposed. She was too tenacious to give up on him now, and knowing she was looking for a way to get him home helped. Once he’d figured out he could touch the glow panel in response, running his fingers through its wispy light, he’d felt elated. He wasn’t so alone after all.

The galley didn’t have anything in it; the food goo dispenser made a half-hearted sort of wheeze as it expelled a toxic-looking liquid, and the trickle of water that had come out of the tap was brackish. He’d been ready to cup his hands under it and drink it, but something in the back of his mind had stopped him, and he’d instead let it run through his fingers.

 _It’s not safe_ , he thought, turning away from the few puddles at the bottom of the pool. _If I drink that, I’ll never go home. I’ll become like that thing_.

He found himself back on the bridge after wandering the halls. The creature didn’t seem to be anywhere, which was both comforting and profoundly unsettling. He certainly hadn’t hallucinated the cause of the bruises and cuts on his body, but he also didn’t want to be confronted with the reality that his only company here was a creature with eyes that he knew he’d seen before, somewhere. Still he took advantage of the relative calm, like he had back at the arena. There, he hadn’t known when he’d be awoken for a match or even given a meal, though they’d kept him in decently good condition so he could fight.

This place was too much like the arena, and Shiro never wanted to go back there either in truth or mentally, and trying to avoid falling into the same patterns he’d adopted to survive as the Champion was like trying to climb up a sand dune.

There still weren’t any stars visible beyond the windows on the bridge, but Allura’s dais glowed faintly, and when he stepped onto it Shiro felt warm, safe, like when he was on it nothing could touch him. He sat, putting his back to one of the pedestals so he could watch the door but not have to be standing, conserving his energy by putting his mind to work instead of his body. Even though thoughts of Slav caused some sort of reflexive annoyance, it was easy to think of his situation in the terms the engineer had used 

This world seemed to be a reflection of how things were in the reality he was from, Shiro thought. Things from his reality could interact with things here, but they didn’t completely cross over – like Allura being able to speak and be heard here. Shiro could cause things to happen too – apparently his presence caused some kind of electrical interference, or else the trick with the glow panel wouldn’t have worked. Worst-case scenario, he could use that to communicate if he got into trouble here. Hopefully someone would be on the other side to listen.

If he could do things in his current reality to affect things in the one that he was from, Shiro reasoned, there _had_ to be some way he could get back. He’d just have to… find it. Somehow.

Putting his head in his hands, Shiro tried to think through the exhaustion haze to the physics classes he’d taken at the Garrison. They’d mostly focused on flight physics and later, astrophysics and navigation, but one of his teachers had been involved in some of the more theoretical stuff, and it had been a game to get him sidetracked so they didn’t have to actually learn. Some of it had stuck though, and Shiro struggled to think back. It had something to do with wormholes, he remembered. Something to do with subatomic particles. Why couldn’t he remember? What had been _wrong_ with him? Hadn’t he known then—

No, Shiro thought, leaning his head back against the pedestal. He’d had no way of knowing then that in a few short years he’d be held captive for a year by a hostile alien race, and then part of a team, fighting alongside a princess with magical powers, piloting a giant mechanical lion.

He closed his eyes, reaching out along that thread. Black had been excited – probably, his connection with her was as weak as his connection to the rest of his reality. But she’d been excited, and he’d thought that as he woke up he’d gotten an image of Allura in the pilot’s seat of the lion. It was a ridiculous idea, he’d _told_ Keith to take over. Allura was more effective from where she was in the castle, it played more to her strengths, with her ability to use all the quintessence-linked Altean tech to the fullest. But if he trusted anything right now, he trusted that connection, and he trusted Allura to find him.

His whole body felt heavy, and the idea that he was somehow safe here on Allura’s dais was pervasive. Shiro let himself drift; it wasn’t quite like being home, but it was close enough, the safest and most comfortable he’d felt since he’d come here.

When had he started thinking about the other castle, the _real_ one, as home? When had it taken over from Earth? Had it been the minute he’d looked up into the eyes of his lion and felt her intelligence, her acceptance of him with all his broken parts and jagged edges? Or had it been with his fists against the back of a Galra pod, watching Allura watch him escape?

There’d always been this undercurrent in the back of his mind, whenever he’d been thrown into a cell to wait between bouts in the arena. A sense that he’d die there, his blood leaking onto the floor, no hope of escape or rescue on the horizon… and later, that he’d die on the table, a pair of glowing yellow eyes the last thing he saw. Now, despite his renewed hope, he felt the darkness clawing back in.

Shiro forced his eyes open. The glow he sat in washed over him, and he turned his face up to it, letting it bolster him. He’d stay here a while, he decided. It was exposed, but for the first time in however long he’d been here, he felt truly safe.

*

Her ears rang with alarms coming from every system on the ship, but Allura blocked them out. She had to; keeping the Castle moving and the wormhole stable was taking more energy than usual, which made her worry that the teludav was damaged somehow. The lenses were delicate, but even though Hunk had been working on a way to seat them in their brackets so that they were more cushioned the castle had taken a beating.

“Just hold it a little longer!” Coran shouted, and Allura tightened her fingers on the control pylons, gritting her teeth, willing herself to have just a little more energy, just a little more, _just a little—_

They reverted into realspace, the ship groaning around them. Allura sagged for a moment, letting the voices of her paladins and Coran fade into the background noise. What she _needed_ was time to unpack the last few hours – Shiro and the light, flying the Black lion, the things the lion had revealed to her – but she very deliberately drew a breath, straightened her back. She had to be strong for the others.

The planet Coran had told her about was right ahead, and Allura brought the Castle down on a large, grassy plain without bothering to run another scan. As she powered things down or put them in idle it shut off the audible alarms, though her screens still blinked red and yellow. “Pidge, Hunk, Slav,” she said softly. “Work with Coran. Prioritize any repairs to flight systems, then defense, then weapons, then anything else. Keith… stay here, keep an eye on scanners in case any Galra ships followed us here, and comm us if anything pops up. Lance, come with me. We’re going outside.”

The protests started up again, more quietly this time but still here, but Allura simply got up and walked out. She had a monster to deal with, a ship in need of repair, cranky lions (who, apparently, had no problem divulging secrets when it suited them), and a co-commander trapped in some sort of limbo state… but if she didn’t get outside the ship for a minute, feel the light of this planet’s suns on her face and breathe air that wasn’t recycled half a dozen times, she would not be able to function.

Being strong didn’t mean being invincible, after all.

Lance followed her silently, and she could all but feel his worry radiating off him as they descended in the exterior lift and stepped out into the world.

It reminded her more than a little of Altea, with its wide open spaces. There were no mountains, though; Altea had been a craggy world, even close to the oceans, interspersed with deep glacier-carved valleys. This place had hills, and she thought she could see the smudge of a mountain chain far away, but what she felt now was the light of this planet’s two yellow stars on her skin, and a breeze blowing through her hair. Turning her face upward, Allura closed her eyes, breathing deeply. The char and ozone of the ship were overpowering, but she could smell green and growing things, water.

“Princess?” Lance asked softly.

“I apologize, Lance.” She took a breath, then another, then turned to face him. “We need to ensure there aren’t any surprises in the immediate vicinity, but I also just need a moment off the ship. Coran would have made a fuss if I’d tried to go alone….”

“...and you just wanted to spend some quality time with your favorite paladin!” Lance grinned, but it wasn’t his usual boisterous ear-to-ear split. “It’s okay. I’ll keep ya safe, Princess.”

“I know you will.”

They walked, and Allura asked questions here and there, trying to assess how Lance was feeling. The lights in the hallway had freaked him out, he said, but if it meant that Shiro was still around he was glad. She even managed to pry out of him that he wasn’t all that upset at Keith for nearly getting them all killed, just frustrated. Allura let him talk, sensing that it was less to tell her anything and more for Lance to comfort himself. She knew he’d come from a large family, and being with so few people on so big a ship in the vast and unkind emptiness of space was wearing on him. She’d long ago figured out that he just didn’t like the silence.

But he wasn’t stupid; he noticed they were being watched the same moment that she did, and had his bayard out and ready in seconds.

“You wanna see if they’ll talk?”

“Best to try.” They walked forward together until they were a few yards away from whoever was watching them. Lance gripped his bayard but kept it lowered, and Allura raised her chin.

“I am Princess Allura of Altea,” she said, her voice sounding even louder on the quiet plain. “We mean you no harm; if you’ll come out, we can talk.”

There was a rustling, and a young woman popped up out of one of the stands of bushes that dotted the rolling hillside. She had black hair, striking blue-green eyes… and very familiar deep green markings. Allura drew a sharp breath.

“You’re Altean!”

“ _And_ cute,” Lance added, lowering his bayard the rest of the way. Allura shot him a look.

“So are you,” the woman said. She pushed out of the bushes, and—yes, even though they weren’t made of familiar materials, Allura could recognize the cut of her clothing, the kind of thing that explorers, mountaineers would wear. Ten thousand years and countless generations had wrought their own changes, of course, but…

“How— _how is this possible?_ ” Allura breathed. “How did you come to be here?”

The woman shrugged. “My family’s been here for thousands of years,” she said. “But… we thought you were just a myth, a story. My grandmother used to tell me the tragedy of the fall of Altea...”

“Wait,” Lance said. “Are there _more_ Alteans here?”

“Well, yes.”

And that was how Allura ended up in the cockpit of the Blue lion with Coran, Keith, Lance, and the young Altean woman whose name had turned out to be Kella. She’d been awed, seeing the Castle and the lions in their hangars, which was why they were bringing Blue. In the back of the group, she rested a hand on the control panel and felt the excitement of the lion thrum up through her. Blue had always been a more excitable and eager lion, quick to trust and loyal. Lance, she thought, half-listening as he did his best to charm an indifferent Kella, was more than suitable match for his Blue and always had been.

They circled the town once before setting down. It was sizable, clearly having expanded over the ten thousand years since the fall of Altea and her arrival here, and she could see people – _her people –_ coming out of buildings and pointing up at the lion. When they landed and she walked out of the lion’s mouth, she was met with a crowd gawking and pointing at her, whispering among themselves.

Kella stepped up beside her. “I know you’ve all heard the story,” she said. “But the story of the hidden princess was true—this is Allura, Princess of Altea. She’s here with Voltron.”

They were all looking at her, and for a moment her mind went blank. For so long she’d wished that there were more Alteans in the universe, that her people hadn’t been lost with her planet, that Zarkon’s depravity hadn’t completely wiped them away. Now faced with the fulfillment of that wish, she had no idea how to proceed, what to say, what to do. These people had thought her a myth. Now she was real to them, and how did she respond to that?

“Princess?”

Coran put a hand on her shoulder, and she took a breath. He was so steady, despite being as affected as she was. Allura took a breath and stepped forward, tilting her chin up

“I’ve wanted to see proof that more Alteans survived the destruction of our homeworld ever since I awoke after ten thousand years,” she said. “I knew that our people were more resilient, that we would not let ourselves be so easily extinguished. Seeing you all here… I am so very, very glad.” It wasn’t elegant, but the people nearest her smiled, and a wave of whispered approvals reached her ears. “I’m only sorry that’s it’s taken so long for me to find you. But now, with Voltron and its brave paladins, we are working to defeat the Galra Empire and end its reign of terror in the universe.”

While she got the sense that the Alteans weren’t quite ready to just accept her, they did come forward to to introduce themselves. She introduced Keith and Lance, smiling as they were both quickly enveloped by curious people. Keith seemed to loosen up a little, which made her glad. He hadn’t had to say that he was upset by his own performance; Allura could feel it coming off him in waves.

“Princess Allura?”

She turned to see Kella escorting an elderly woman forward. The woman extended her hands and Allura took them, her eyes widening slightly when she felt power flow up her skin.

“You’re a sacred Altean?” she asked. “I thought...” _I thought Zarkon had made sure you were all gone._

“I am. One of a long line of them, with my many-times-great grandfather lucky enough to be offworld when...” she made a motion, and Allura nodded.

“Very lucky indeed. My heart is glad to see you, Lady.”

“Call me Althya. And my heart is glad to see that Altea’s crown has someone to bear it still, despite the best efforts of the Galra.” She turned Allura’s hands over in hers for a long moment, silent. Allura looked at Kella, who shrugged.

“She wanted to meet you,” the young woman said simply.

“You _are_ of the royal house,” Althya whispered. “I can feel it in you, the kind of power that only comes from old blood. More than you know, I’d warrant.”

“I’m beginning to find that out.”

Althya peered up at her with eyes unclouded by age. “I’d say you are. Your well runs deep, Princess.”

She ended up sitting in the shade with Althya, talking about the settlement. It had been founded several decafebes after Altea’s destruction, in the chaos that had descended on the universe after the primary peacekeeping and diplomatic conduits had been summarily wiped out. They’d come here to hide, and stayed because it was not home but close enough. Galra patrols didn’t detect them due to a quirk of the planet’s atmospheric composition, and with only very occasional offworld trips they were able to survive. The last trip off planet had been several months ago, and the rumors of Voltron’s reappearance had just begun to swirl.

“It is good to know that Voltron is back, with one of the royal house at its head.” Althya took Allura’s hand again. “I can feel that in you, too. A deep bond, not just with the lions but with their paladins. They are a strange people, these humans.”

Allura watched as Lance showed off for a crowd of the younger Alteans while Keith looked on dubiously. “They are. But they are kind and brave and loyal, too. I had my doubts at the start, but now I cannot imagine anyone else in their place.”

She looked down. Like a comet drawn back toward its star, her thoughts turned to Shiro. If she could not find a way to bring him home, she might have to find someone else. Piloting the Black lion and also operating the Castle was a position she couldn’t maintain. But she didn’t want anyone else to be the Black paladin, she thought stubbornly. She wanted Shiro back.

“Lady Althya, may I ask you a question about quintessence?”

“Of course, Princess.”

“Do you know of any way to use quintessence to open a path between realities?”

Althya was silent for a long time, thinking. Allura watched as Lance made three shots in quick succession and hit the three targets dead-on. The crowd of onlookers cheered, and Lance made a face at Keith.

“I do not, and for this I am sorry, for clearly it is important to you. May I ask why?”

Allura told her everything – about the monster Pidge and Hunk had seen, the way the lights flickered, the way she’d been able to communicate with Shiro. When she finished, Althya’s expression had gone from interested to concerned.

“You have a deep bond with this man, this Shiro. He is one of the paladins?”

“Yes. He is the Black lion’s paladin.” It felt good to use present tense, and distantly she sensed that Black knew what she was saying and was pleased by it. “He commands Voltron with me.”

“There are some references to a world with properties like the one you described. It is a dark place, a mirror to our own world, described by those like the one you call Slav. If he is there, then I fear it may be too late for him, Princess.”

“It is _not_.” Her words were more forceful than she meant them to be, but the thought that she was going to lose Shiro, _really_ lose him, made her stomach clench and her heart thud painfully in her chest. “I told him I would help him find his way home, and I will see it done. If he can be sent there, then there is a way to bring him home.”

Althya put up her hands. “I meant no offense,” she said gently. “If there is a way, Princess, I do not doubt you have the power to make it happen. After all, what we do is largely defined by our will to do it.”

Those words rattled around in Allura’s mind as Lance took them back to the Castle, plus a few of the Alteans from the town. She let Coran show them around and went up to the observation deck after they were gone, calling up the Castle’s repository of information on quintessence and its many uses. When she was young, just learning how to use the power she was born with, she’d learned that _will_ was the driving force behind anything done with quintessence, and even more so when operating systems on ships, like the teludav. She had to hold a set of coordinates in her mind and will the wormhole to open and stay open; she had wanted, so badly, to put a stop to what Haggar was doing, to keep her paladins safe and take out this horrible weapon Zarkon had created. So it followed that if she wanted to find some way to rescue Shiro from wherever in the multiverse he’d landed, she had only to will a door into existence.

But the resources at her disposal were maddeningly vague; certainly they mentioned other planes of existence, but not in any detail, and though she found a reference to a world that mirrored their own, it said nothing more other than that it was dangerous, and never to travel there.

Just the fact that travel between realities was _possible_ was enough to make her head spin. It hadn’t ever been something she’d considered before, and Allura pushed aside the seven windows of information that she’d called up and leaned back in her chair, fingertips pressed to her temples, lost in thought. If there was this mirror reality, then there had to be a reality where Shiro had _never_ disappeared, a reality where Zarkon had never turned on them, a reality where Altea had never been destroyed…

She got up, waving the windows away completely. She had a resource on board who she could ask, if she could keep him on task. _Two_ resources, even. Allura tapped her comm.

“Pidge?”

“ _I’m here, Princess, what’s up?_ ”

“Where are you? And is Slav with you?”

“ _Uh_ … _yeah, he is. We’re_ _checking on the teludav right now._ ”

“I’m coming down.”

Pidge and Slav were torso-deep in a console outside the lens chamber when she arrived. Peering in, Allura breathed a sigh of relief; the lenses all looked to be intact. “Pidge,” she called. There was a clang and a yelp from Slav, but they both backed out, looking up at her.

“How’s the teludav?”

“Undamaged, thankfully,” Pidge replied. “Hunk gave me some pointers and Slav… well—“

“I have made some alterations to the conduits that conduct your quintessence to power the teludav,” Slav gestured with two of his arms. “It should increase efficiency by seventy-nine percent.”

“That’s wonderful, thank you.” Allura folded her hands in front of her. “I have some questions for both of you.”

“I mean, if it’s about our repairs, we’re going as fast as we can.”

“It’s not about the repairs. It’s about other realities...”

*

Joxam stood quietly in the back of the bridge, listening as the subcommander gave her report to Prince Lotor. He’d managed to escape Gronak’s command ship before Voltron had destroyed it, and druids had been assigned to this ship as well, so when he’d mentioned that he’d been guarding the druids when their power had been turned back on them, Subcommander Ytarr had waved her hand and ordered that it remain so.

He’d tried not to make his relief too obvious. Being assigned to druids was… unsettling, but it provided him with a lot of very valuable information, and what he had heard when they’d made their own report to Haggar was enough to make him want to _immediately_ send a transmission, but he held back, kept his expression flat and his body still and stiff.

He got his chance late at night, when the ship was in hyperjump on the way back to the main fleet. The night shift was skeleton crew only, and deep in the heart of the command pylon, the long-range communications room was deserted. Joxam shut and locked the door, then went to the console. First was a series of codes, meant to mask his use of the console and encrypt the message he was going to send, then bounce it between relays so many times that it would be untraceable either to his end or its destination. Then was the message itself, written in the specific cant of the Blade.

When he was finished, Joxam deleted all traces of his use of the console and went back to his bunk. The Galra Empire had learned something about Voltron, but he had learned something about the Galra, and the quick change of leadership. He hoped it would help.

*

The Castle was quiet, early in the day cycle. Usually Allura would be awake, but she hadn’t commed him to let him know she was up, and if she was asleep Coran preferred to let her stay that way. He’d seen the wear on her, and wondered if she realized the extent of her own heartache over Shiro’s disappearance. Allura was too much like her father in so many ways; she set aside her own feelings so often that she hurt herself. He’d promised Alfor, right before getting into the cryopod ten thousand years ago, that he’d take care of her. Sometimes he wondered if he was failing.

She appeared a _varga_ later, dressed for battle and not at all appearing like she’d been up half the night cycle talking about theoretical physics and multiverse theory with Pidge and Slav. He’d brought her tea as the three of them had leaned over a table, Allura peppering both of them with questions. She had an idea in mind, and Coran worried…

“Good morning,” she said briskly, stepping up onto her dais and calling up status reports. “Repairs seem to be going well.”

“There was less damage than we thought, Princess. Most of the affected systems are ready to be rebooted and powered back up, and we should be able to leave this planet within a day.”

“That’s good news.” Allura was quiet for a while, checking through the ship’s systems herself. “Hunk did a good job with the new bracketing system for the teludav lenses. I didn’t see any cracked ones yesterday.”

“That’s a relief. I don’t think there are many lenses floating around the universe anymore—hold on a tick.” His console was beeping, and Coran leaned over, pulling up the message indicator that had appeared in the corner. “I’ve got a message incoming from the Blade of Marmora. Shall I call Kolivan in?”

“Yes. And the other paladins.”

The message was distorted, the text fuzzing out, but it was clear enough for Kolivan to decipher the cant and read it for them.

“’ _Zarkon is gone_ ,’” Kolivan said. “’ _He’s been ripped from this world_.’”

“Weird,” Keith said. He was standing halfway between his chair and Shiro’s, looking at the text projected up onto the screens. “What do you think it means?”

“Our informant has said that Zarkon is in a coma on the command ship, which would explain the suddenness of Lotor’s rise to power. But that’s a strange way to put it, ‘ripped from this world’.”

“Either way, it means we don’t have to deal with Zarkon anymore, right?” Hunk leaned forward in his chair. “It means he’s out of commission.”

“Obviously the Galra aren’t that much weaker for it, if the attack we just got through is any indication. And we’re still making repairs, which… Hunk, there’s a weird anomaly in the Black lion’s hangar again—“

“No way, man, _no way_ , the last time there was that monster and—“

“I’ll go with you.” Keith turned to look at them. “If something happens, I’ll be able to at least alert you. And… maybe it’ll help me build a bond with the Black lion.”

Based on what Coran had seen before, he thought that was very unlikely. Privately he’d thought it was a fool’s errand, trying to move paladins between lions anyway; the lion chose the paladin, after all, and Red was as picky as they came.

“That sounds like a good idea, Keith, thank you. I’ll stay here and doublecheck these systems with Coran. Report in when you’re done.”

*

“I’m _telling_ you, man, this is not good. This is tempting fate. Ill-advised and badly timed, and don’t you think it’s weird that nobody’s _done_ anything about the monster—“

“I think Allura just has more on her mind than she has hours in the day,” Keith said. He’d seen the Princess’ face when she’d gone into Shiro’s room, following the lights. This monster story of Hunk and Pidge’s was one more thing on top of, well, more than _they_ were being told. He suspected that Allura felt Shiro’s disappearance like a fresh wound, just the same as he did, ripped open anew every time it came to mind.

“Yeah, but a _monster_?” Hunk’s entire body tensed up as soon as they entered the Black lion’s hangar, but save for the lion herself, it was empty. “I just think it should be more important.”

“I’m not _arguing_ with you, Hunk, but...”

Keith tuned them out, walking over to the lion’s particle barrier. She remained as impassive as ever, though he thought he felt a vague pressure in his mind that wasn’t from Red. “Hey,” he said, feeling a little silly as he put his hand on the barrier. “’s me again. I know you don’t have much to say to me, but… I miss him too, okay? I’m just trying to do what he wanted.”

The barrier didn’t drop, but he felt a definite presence in his mind, and smiled a little at a flood of images – thoughts of Shiro’s, he realized, affectionate feelings he’d had about the pilot he’d taken under his wing and treated like family, pride at the way Keith had progressed as a pilot since coming to fly Red. He leaned his forehead against the barrier, biting his lip to counteract the tears stinging his eyes.

“Is that really what he thought about me?”

A sense of affirmation—cut abruptly short, replaced by the barrier dropping and Black roaring, danger flooding Keith’s mind. He spun, bayard in hand, and saw that Hunk and Pidge were scrambling back, their tools and diagnostic equipment forgotten, from a section of the wall. It was… he couldn’t explain it, or even really comprehend it, but it looked like the wall was _warping_ , stretching, being pushed outward by something with claws and teeth and spines.

“Get _back_!” he yelled at the others, his sword appearing as he rushed forward, just as the wall burst like a balloon and a huge, dark-scaled monster with glowing purple eyes leaped into the hangar. Its claws left gouges in the floor as it planted its feet and let out an ear-splitting scream, answered by another roar from Black and followed by faint roars from the other lions. Keith tightened his grip on his bayard, bracing himself as the monster lowered its head, staring him down. For a moment there was the briefest flash of _deja vu_ , but then the monster was charging him, the floor plating vibrating under his feet as he braced himself.

“Princess!” he yelled into his comm. “We’ve got a situation down here!”

*

Allura was running diagnostics when warning lights lit up her screens, indicating there was an intruder on board. A second later her earrings chimed with their alarm tone.

“ _Princess!_ ” it was Keith, breathing hard. “ _We’ve got a situation down here!”_

“Keith!” Allura spun from display to display, making frantic hand gestures at Coran to help her. She shoved aside windows, trying to pull up security feeds but not believing what she was being shown. “Keith, what’s going on! Report!”

Only harsh breathing, and the distant sounds of the lions roaring in their hangars, came to her ears. Then—

“Allura?”

She spun around, her heart leaping into her throat. “Shiro?”

He was there—looking strangely translucent and definitely the worse for wear, but it was _Shiro_ and he was _there_ and her eyes stung as she reached out blindly for him, daring not to hope, trying not to read too much into the way his eyes flooded with relief when she acknowledged him and reached out too with both hands, as though trying to pull her in—

Their hands passed through each other and Allura let out a choked sob, her hands going to her mouth. Coran was just off the dais, but he was pale as a sheet, his eyes wide.

“Shiro?” he said, sounding just as incredulous. “Shiro, is that really you?”

“Are you here?” Allura asked, reaching out again. Her fingertips passed through his chest, but he didn’t disappear—he wasn’t a hallucination if Coran could see him too, he wasn’t a _dream_ , he was _there,_ he was real. “ _Where are you_ , Shiro?"

“How are _you_ here?” Shiro looked terrible, exhausted and wan with his armor scuffed and damaged and torn away in one place on his torso, long claw marks dragged through his skin. “You aren’t—you aren’t _here_ , are you?”

“I’m on the bridge—“

“I mean _here_ , in this place, you’re not _here_ , you can’t be—“ Shiro took a breath, collected himself. “Princess, I need to find a way out. I was sent here by quintessence, you have to find a way to use that to get me out of here, there’s a monster—“

Allura gasped. “A monster—Keith and Hunk and Pidge—they were in the Black lion’s hangar just now, they’re being chased by something—“ she wanted to turn to see what she could hear Keith still yelling about, but she feared that if she took her eyes off Shiro for even a second he would be ripped from her again.

“They can’t be in there,” Shiro told her, fear as present in his voice as she’d ever heard it. “That’s where it likes to be. It’s like it’s drawn to the Black lion, even though where I’m at it’s only a pile of—oh, oh _no—“_

“Shiro, I _will get you back.”_ Allura wished she could take his hands, hold them to her face, hold them to her heart so he could feel how sincere she was. “I will not abandon you to this dark place.”

He snapped out of whatever thought he’d been having and reached for her again. “I know,” Shiro whispered. “I know, I trust you, Allura, I—“

Shiro’s head suddenly snapped to the side, looking at something she couldn’t see, and then he was screaming, his arm glowing with a sick and ghostly purple light. He backed away, toward the edge of the dais.

“Shiro? What is it, what’s going on—“

“ _It’s_ here,” Shiro hissed. “It can find me, because it’s—“

He was suddenly jerked to the side by a claw hooked around his middle, and his scream cut off in mid-sound, replaced by an otherworldly echoing roar.

“Shiro?” Allura spun in place, her fists clenched and the boiling sea of quintessence within her flowing through her veins. She didn’t know what she’d do, but she would use her own hands to end this monster if it meant saving Shiro’s life, she would do it—

The approach of footsteps made her spin again to see Keith, Pidge, and Hunk jogging onto the bridge. All of them had their bayards out and activated, and they were wide-eyed and washed-out with fear, turning as if looking for something. She charged toward them.

“Did you see him?” she demanded, trying to be commanding despite the way her voice choked up. “Did you see Shiro? Did you see what took him?”

All three put their weapons down, and faint noises behind her told her that Coran and Kolivan, who had stayed on the bridge to do some analysis of the message they’d received, had put their own weapons down as well. “We didn’t see Shiro, Princess,” Hunk said. His bayard flashed gold for a minute before reverting to its inactive state, and he tucked it back on his belt. “We were being chased by that—that— _thing,_ but it disappeared a few turns back. Keith thought it was going to make for the bridge to attack you, but… it looks like it just vanished.”

“Did you say Shiro was here?” Keith asked. Her heart jolted at the sudden hope in his eyes.

“Yes—yes, I saw him, just there, on my dais, we were talking and he was alive and then he was taken by some… _thing—“_ Allura put her head in her hands for a minute. “I know it seems impossible, but he was _right there—“_

“We believe you,” Pidge said. “We just. Need a minute.”

Allura couldn’t sit still; her body, now full of quintessence drawn in for use, felt too full. “Coran, scan the ship,” she ordered. “Look for Shiro’s life signs, look for his suit tracker, look for any sign of whatever it was that attacked the paladins.” She got back on her dais, hoping that nobody saw her swiping at her eyes with her sleeve as she began flipping through diagnostic and scanning screens.

“I will not lose him again,” she whispered.

*

Shiro hit the clouded window and fell to the floor, grunting in pain. He’d landed on his injured side, but he had no time to stop and process; he had to get up, keep fighting, keep moving. His arm glowed angrily in the darkness as he ground his teeth and leaped up to meet the monster coming at him. It shrieked in pain as he dug his hand into its shoulder joint, and one of its arms went limp.

 _Must have severed something important_ , Shiro thought, retreating but keeping his fists up. Adrenaline gave him the kind of energy he hadn’t had in the days since he’d come here, and when the monster lunged at him again, too stubborn to quit despite being gravely injured, he was able to dodge and jab upward with his hand again, a glowing afterimage in his eyes where he swung his fist up into the monster’s chest, sending it flying across the ruined bridge.

For a moment Shiro crouched there, breathing hard. The creature was writhing in pain, its long limbs slamming against control consoles and the opaque windows, too fast and dangerous for him to want to dart in and finish it off. So instead he waited, watching as it hunkered down at the other side of the bridge and glared at him balefully. Its glowing purple eyes were full of malice, hunger, hatred, intelligence…

He really should have recognized Zarkon’s eyes before. He’d become intimately familiar with them, after all.

Shiro ground his teeth against the adrenaline ebbing away and leaving his limbs shaking and weak. If anything he felt worse now than he did before, but he wasn’t going to let it end here, not when he’d seen Allura, not when he knew she was in danger from this thing just as much as he was. She’d said she’d find a way to bring him back, but if his death here meant she’d be safe forever from this beast, this strange manifestation of the man who’d killed her world, he’d happily die a thousand deaths without looking back.

For now, though, Shiro fought to keep himself alive when it attacked again, its one good arm and its razor-sharp claws coming at him hard and fast and just as desperate as he was to survive. Strikes from his Galra arm not only angered this version of Zarkon, they left glowing wounds, slashes across body and through flesh, until at last the beast screamed and turned, fleeing down the hall. Like Shiro, it knew when a battle wasn’t worth it.

He waited, crouched behind one of the broken paladin chairs – Keith’s, the dark glow panels on the sides still had a red tinge – until he could be sure that the monster had gone. When it had been quiet for long enough, he slumped. His limbs shook from the adrenaline now draining out of his system, energy he couldn’t afford to lose but couldn’t hold onto. On wobbly legs he stumbled back to Allura’s podium. Here, in the circle of their paladin stations and on her dais, he felt safe.

“ _Shiro?_ ”

Despite his exhaustion, he smiled. _I’ve worried her, probably_ , Shiro thought. He couldn’t let that stand. Reaching out to the nearest glow panel, he rested his fingertips on it.

*

Allura took a deep breath when the lights steadied and a panel on her dais flashed once. “You’re alive,” she whispered. The panel flashed again. “The lights were flickering, I wasn’t sure. I thought I’d lost you.”

The panel flashed twice, vehemently. Allura smiled, sliding down. “Good. Because I don’t want to lose you again, Shiro.” Two more flashes.

“We’re working on a way to get you out. Not just me, but… the others, they’re so smart and brave. Have Keith tell you about it when you get back, he was most admirable.” She saw the other paladins conversing in whispers by the door, and sighed. “Be safe, Shiro. Trust me.”

The single flash was accompanied by a mental push from the Black lion, and Allura liked to think that the sense of warmth and trust was what the lion had been able to pick up from her paladin, an echo from this shadowed otherworld. Before she stood again to go see what her paladins were talking about, she closed her eyes, fingertips resting on the panel that had been blinking. _Show it to him_ , she thought. _Show him what I show you_.

The lion’s agreement was still reverberating in her mind when she rejoined the others, all of whom seemed to be talking over each other. “All right,” she announced, cutting through the discussion. “What’s going on here?”

Her eyes went first to Keith, who put up his hands. “I’m not smart enough to understand what _they_ \--” he pointed at Hunk and Pidge “--were talking about. Lance and I just didn’t know if it was a good idea.”

“If anyone _asked_ me I’d say it wasn’t, but...” Lance took a breath, nodding to himself before finishing. “I think it’s the best chance we have.”

“Of what?”

“Of getting Shiro back.” Pidge led the group over to her station, pulling up the displays. “So the internal scanners are always passively running in the background, right? Well, I wondered if they registered anything specific before that thing jumped out of the wall at us.”

“It did register as a sensor anomaly both times,” Hunk added. He looked pleased with himself. “So Pidge began to do a little digging just now, and we think we’ve uncovered something we can use.”

“It’s a specific emission.” Pidge made a quick gesture with her fingers (and Allura was once more impressed at how readily the Green paladin had picked up on Altean technology) and a graph appeared on the window next to her station. “Look, this spike here? Comparing that with the timestamp on the security footage, this happened when the monster broke through. It’s some kind of subatomic particle, I can’t be sure what _exactly_ without more analysis, but it doesn’t matter because I _think_ we can replicate it. With Hunk and Slav’s help.”

“Replicate…?”

“The exact conditions needed to make a… I guess a gateway, a portal to wherever the monster comes from, because the monster comes from wherever Shiro is. If _it_ can come here, _we_ can go there.”

“I think it’s stupid and dangerous,” Keith said. “But if it brings Shiro back...”

“Work on it,” Allura said firmly. She felt light for the first time since she’d seen the empty pilot’s chair in the Black lion. “Keep me updated. Until then, nobody goes in the Black lion’s hangar save myself—or Keith,” she added, catching the beginnings of a glare on the Red paladin’s face. “And not without good reason. If that’s where this creature has decided to haunt, then for now we will stay out of its way.”

“Hey, why does _Keith_ get to—“

“Because he is in charge. But I want the two of you to keep an eye on things.” She smiled at Lance, watched him straighten a little. “If that thing can appear and disappear on this ship at will, I’ll need my sharpshooter to help keep everyone safe.”

She ended up spending time with the development team; Slav, muttering the whole time because he’d thought that Pidge’s questions had been out of genuine curiosity, making tweaks to equations that blossomed out of Pidge’s stylus and changing things to Hunk’s designs. Conceptually Allura had been well aware that these two were incredibly smart and talented, but seeing it at work gave her a new appreciation for their abilities.

“I still think this idea is poorly executed,” Slav groused, eyeing the three-dimensional design render. “And we have not yet solved the problem of power. In eighty-three percent of all realities, the device runs out of power and traps both you and the Black Paladin.”

“Will the Castle’s power plant not be sufficient?”

“Not quite.” Hunk pulled up some of Pidge’s work, stepping in while Pidge was on an ordered food break. “It’ll _probably_ be able to maintain the gateway once it’s open, but—“

“Breaking into other realities is not only highly _dangerous_ but it requires more power than even the largest crystal ever supplied by any Balmera could supply.” Slav crossed three of his pairs of arms. “Even if we could initialize such an event there is a ninety-two percent chance that it would create a feedback loop that multiplies infinitely until the resulting buildup destroys not only us, but collapses in upon itself and destroys all planets and objects within this sector of space.”

“Maybe we should use it near a Galra fleet.” Hunk was looking at the equations again. “Do you think quintessence would do it? I mean, the Galra use it to power entire ships, and I’ve seen you do some really crazy things with it, Princess. You revived a planet, it’s _gotta_ be enough to do this.”

“Mm, it _could_ work,” Slav said, and began typing madly into his console. “Provided the Princess can sustain the amount of output for long enough for our machine to reach the necessary excitation levels.”

But as she walked back toward the bridge, Allura began to doubt.  She had no idea how to replicate what she’d done on the komar, or how to gather enough quintessence to tear a hole in reality and still have enough energy left to walk into the rift and pull Shiro out.  From what he said it sounded as though this place he was in, this dark mirror world, was hellish and full of terrors.  She would want to be at full strength, but...

  
_I will make it work,_ Allura told herself firmly as she got back up on her dais, pulling up her screens. Between the sensor interference and the fact that they weren’t being tracked through Black anymore, they’d be safe enough to finish repairs and, hopefully, find Shiro.

Before it was too late.

*

“ _...thought I’d lost you_.”

Shiro jabbed at the glow panel twice. The thought that he’d made Allura sad cut him deeply, but if he could do something about it, even from so far away…

 _I don’t want to lose you again_ echoed around his mind, long after Allura had left. The Black lion had also reached out across realities to him, filling him with warmth. It had been like a blanket being draped around his shoulders, and he drifted in it, letting himself rest. Allura and the others were working on a way to get him out, it sounded like, and all he had to do was hang on. For them, if not for himself.

The buzzing of the lights brought him out of a doze, and Shiro blinked sleep from his eyes, turning his head to look in the direction of the noise. The bridge doors had been knocked out of their tracks by the monster when it had first come looking for him, and he could see the lights in the corridor beyond brightening, and saw a subtle glow beginning to illuminate the dais. It was Allura—somehow he knew that even in this reality the ship responded to her—and he sat up. She couldn’t see him, but if she had more to add, he needed to be ready to listen.

The attack came out of nowhere.

He should have anticipated it, knowing now who was trapped with him here in this world; Zarkon didn’t give up, probably didn’t know _how_ to, and Shiro should have remembered that beating him once just meant that he was meaner when he came back. Struggling to his feet, Shiro activated his arm—but the strike came from behind him, as one of the creature’s long limbs reached out and swiped him off Allura’s dais, sending him flying across the bridge.

“You’re not going to get me here,” Shiro ground out, spitting blood as he climbed to his feet. Across the bridge the creature roared, its eyes—Zarkon’s eyes—glaring at him, cutting through the haze of darkness. “You couldn’t take me out before. I’m not going to let you win _here_.”

The fight was short. Shiro got in his share of hits, and by the time that the Zarkon-monster roared and hooked him in one of its limbs, slamming him against the wall so hard he felt the metal buckle as his back slammed into it, he’d inflicted a number of wounds that oozed ichor. It fell onto the decking, great black drops that sizzled a little bit when they struck. The strike was a desperate move made by a desperate being, and as Shiro got back to his feet, he clenched his fists, ready to push on. He didn’t want to die, but if he took this _thing_ with him, it would all be worth it.

“ _Shiro?_ ”

It was the proximity of Allura’s voice, the _realness_ of it, that made him turn. It was stupid to take his eyes off the monster, but—it sounded like she was right behind him, in the room with him, and the _need_ to touch her and feel someone real in this hellscape world was too great, too strong a pull.

She _wasn’t_ in the room with him. When the wall had crumpled behind him it hadn’t revealed rusted circuitry or insulation, but a strange crystalline barrier. It reminded him of the ancient and wavy glass in some historic sites, distorting the _real_ bridge on the _real_ castle ship, with the _real_ Allura just on the other side, her palms pressed to the barrier and a look of horror on her face.

“Allura!” he shouted, running over. The wall wasn’t cold like he expected but warm, pulsating, almost like it was _alive_. He nearly jerked his hand away, but the prospect of pushing through it and grasping Allura’s hands on the other side. “Allura, _help me!_ ”

She beat her fists against the wall, horror turning to frustration. He couldn’t even feel the vibrations from her strikes. “ _We’re coming for you, Shiro!_ ” she cried, still beating her fists on the wall, and his heart ached to see that ears were welling up in her eyes. “ _We’re not going to stop, we have a way, we—Shiro,_ look out!”

He spun, but it was too late. The Zarkon-beast wrapped a clawed limb around him and yanked him back, dragging him away, dragging him deeper into the castle.

*

The roaring of the lions was deafening no matter where they were in the castle, each one broadcasting _Bridgeleaderdangerdangerdanger_ , a confusing swirl of images accompanying it. Luckily the message was clear enough to everyone; Allura was in trouble, and she was on the bridge, and she needed them.

Lance got to her first, freezing in the open doors at the sight of her screaming and pounding her fists on one of the columns that arched up over the bridge. But then he was running to her, grabbing her around her waist and pulling her backward as the others reached the bridge. “Allura, _calm down!_ ” he yelled, trying to keep her from hitting him as well.

“It’s him, it’s Shiro!” she howled, and the pain in her voice wrenched Lance’s heart. “It’s _him_ , that thing’s got him, I have to _go_ , I have to _try—_ “

Keith was there next, grabbing her wrists. “You aren’t going to help Shiro doing this, Princess!” he shouted. “You aren’t going to bring him back by beating yourself up, so _knock it off!_ ”

Maybe it was how blunt he was, but Allura stilled at that, quit struggling against Lance’s grip (which was good, because he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d have been able to hold an Altean who didn’t want to be kept from her goal) and sagged a little, her breath coming in short gasps. Keith watched her carefully as he let her go, but she didn’t move. Lance did the same thing, slowly stepping away. The bridge was totally silent except for her heavy breathing, and eventually she managed to get that under control, swiping at her eyes.

“I saw him,” she whispered. “He was—just there, and—that _thing_ that’s in there with him, the monster that’s appeared here, it took him, it took him _away from me_ and I can’t lose him, I can’t, I—“

Allura closed her eyes when Lance put a hand on her shoulder again, breathing deeply. She still shook under his palm, but her voice was steady at least.

“I’m going to go back to the Alteans,” she said. “I need to learn how much quintessence I can manipulate, and how to control it. Our ability to be successful depends upon this.”

“Princess—“

“If any of you ask if I’m _certain_ I will throw you out into space.” Allura turned on her heel. “Contact my lion if you need me.”

The castle was quiet after that. Pidge and Hunk retreated to their workspace with Slav, continuing to work on fabricating and assembling the device that they’d use to make their portal; Keith took himself and his frustration to the training deck, and Lance was left adrift, at least until Coran found him.

“I’m not really in the mood to clean pods today,” he began, but Coran held up a hand.

“I won’t ask you to. I want you to take your lion and go with the Princess.”

“She wanted to go alone, though?”

“I know she did. But...” Coran tugged on his mustache, a nervous habit of his. “I need someone to be with her right now. I can’t do it, I’m not a paladin like the rest of you. Keith needs to be here in case something happens, the others have their own task to complete. The Princess… she feels she has to bear so much alone. Don’t let her be alone now, when...” he trailed off with a shrug. “It’s not my place to say more, I’m afraid. Just go and let her know that you’re there if she needs you.”

“You think she’ll actually say she does?”

“No, but I also trust you to know when she needs it.”

Which was how Lance ended up landing Blue next to where Black sat, just outside the settlement. While the Alteans were delighted to see him again, Allura was less amused.

“I do _not_ need a babysitter!”

She was advancing on him and Lance backed up until he ran out of room against the wall of the building they were in. “I’m just here if you need me! I’m not going to tell you not to do things, but just—we wanted to make sure you were okay because you’ve been dealing with a lot lately and you shouldn’t have to deal with it alone!”

Allura stared at him for a long moment, then huffed and went back to the cushions she’d been sitting on. “Fine,” she snapped, but he caught the barest hint of a smile.

It was… strange, watching Allura and a couple other Alteans work with quintessence. Or maybe it just felt weird, like something in his gut wanted to respond in kind but couldn’t. Allura’s was different, anyway; while the other two with her were limned in blue-tinged white light, hers shifted between blue-white and pink-white. When they took a break, Lanced asked about it.

“I’m not entirely sure,” the old woman—Althya—said, looking at Allura curiously. “I wondered about it myself. It could just be your royal blood, Princess.”

“I don’t think even my mother would be able to do what I did in the komar, and I remember she was known as the most powerful sacred Altean of the time.” Allura looked at her hands, then clenched them into fists. “I _have_ to learn this, Althya. I have to save the Black Paladin.”

“I understand, Princess, but—“

The ground under them rocked at the same time that Black and Blue roared, and _danger_ exploded in Lance’s mind. Looking across the room at Allura, he saw that she had blanched, her eyes wide.

“We’re under attack!” she cried out, and in the next second she was halfway out the door. Lance scrambled to keep up, his bayard taking its familiar shape in his hands when he called it out. Allura had her staff in hand, still collapsed, looking up as Galra fighters streaked overhead.

“Get your people to shelter,” Lance shouted, calling over one of the Alteans passing by. “Get anyone who can fight and make sure they’re ready if there ends up being a fight on the ground. We’ll handle it in the air. Princess, we gotta—“

“Go,” she finished, and the two of them sprinted across the settlement to their lions.

*

Haggar pressed her palms to the doors, watching as purple-black magic washed outward like flame, rippling along the grooves of the doors and settling into them. When she pulled her hands away, the spots filled in, flashing briefly with violet light before vanishing.

 _I am sorry, my lord_ , she thought. _But I know no other way. Your son is out of my control, and I do not yet have all that I need to bring you back._

Things would have been a lot more complicated had she needed a vessel, like most people escaping a ship from space would have needed. Certainly it would have made it _easier_ , as she wouldn’t have had to expend the energy to get from the command ship to the surface of the planet. But needs must, and she had always done what was necessary, not what was simplest.

The surface of the planet was hot and bright compared to the dim lighting of the command ship, and Haggar pulled her hood further over her eyes to shield them. The castle was situated in an open plain, its particle barrier still up. It hadn’t taken off—probably hoping to still use the interference of the atmosphere on this planet as a defense so their location couldn’t be targeted exactly, although the lions launching from their bays had been enough of a signal to the sensor crews—but it also wasn’t going to be easy to approach from the ground. So she hunkered down and waited, listening to the fighters scream overhead, the roars of the lions. Lotor had not intended this to be a fight that ended the war, but more of a fact-finding sortie. He was curious why they’d stayed in one place, he’d said at the meeting of commanders. He wanted to find out what kept them there.

That didn’t matter to her; whatever was found out, her druids on the commanders’ ships would relay the information to her by their own means. She had to find a way to bring back her emperor.

As the sounds of battle faded, she saw her chance. Anytime a lion came back to the castle, the barrier dropped—for a second, not long enough for anything moving by conventional means to pass through, but she did not move by the ways of the living. As the Red lion came in, moving fast, Haggar drew shadows down around herself, and vanished.

*

Klaxons blared on the bridge as soon as Allura reached it, her hands reaching for the pedestals before they had even fully risen out of her dais. Lions were roaring in the castle, and her head felt full of their warnings, her ears were full of the alarm, and it all added up to a near-unbearable cacophony. “What’s going on? I thought we sent the Galra fleet into retreat?”

“They’re retreating,” Hunk said, tapping icons on his displays, “Don’t think we’re the ones who convinced them to leave, though.”

“There’s an intruder in the castle, Princess!” Coran was pulling the display window up onto the canopy before she even had to ask, showing Keith with his bayard drawn, bearing down on a _very_ familiar figure.

“It’s _Haggar_ , how—“

“I wanna know _why—_ “

Allura ground her teeth; she had to get them off-planet and away before any of the Galra commanders or their leader got any clever ideas about attacking, but it made her _itch_ not to be able to get her own hands around this traitor Altean’s throat. “Lance, Hunk,” she said, “Go help Keith! Pidge, stay here and help me and Coran, keep an eye out for incoming attacks. I want to be able to open a wormhole in one dobosh, do you understand?”

She didn’t wait for acknowledgment but pushed the castle hard as soon as it was back in flight configuration. Despite its size the ship blasted into orbit at tremendous speed, shooting past the massive bulk of the Galra command ship, and with just a few ticks to spare, Allura opened a wormhole. In seconds, they were across the galaxy.

It was still chaos on the ship (how was it that with only a few people on board, things always seemed to escalate?), and as soon as she could she turned helm over to Coran and took off for the Red lion’s hangar. If anything it was worse in here, but when she approached, Red stood up and roared, then crouched down, looking right at her. Elsewhere in the castle, the other four lions replied in kind, and when they finished, it was quiet in the hangar. Allura kept her eyes on the purple-robed figure who had been pushed back, now crowded against the wall by the other paladins.

“Stand down, Keith,” Allura said, hoping her voice relayed calm and command. When Keith had stepped aside for her—not putting his bayard away, but not keeping it leveled at Haggar either—Allura approached.

“I suppose you have a good reason for being here,” she said. “You have five doboshes of my time before I send you drifting back to your emperor.”

Haggar’s eyes darted from Allura to the other paladins and back, narrowing. “It is because of my emperor that I am here,” she said. “We have a mutual enemy in Lotor. I will help you destroy him.”

“So you can sabotage us right afterward and mop up the rest of the universe with Zarkon?” Lance crossed his arms. “Not a _chance_.”

“There remains _some_ honor, and I have the ear of my emperor.”

“Your emperor who’s in a _coma_.” Beside her, Keith nearly vibrated with contained energy. “We aren’t stupid. We know what Lotor being _there_ and you being _here_ means. You’re on the out.”

“This will not be the case.” Haggar straightened, and though everyone tensed, she didn’t make a move and Allura made a small hand gesture to keep them off—for now. “I have a means of bringing Emperor Zarkon back… but I will need Lotor out of the way. You need the Champion back—“

“ _Don’t_ call him that,” Keith hissed. Allura put a hand out, gripping his wrist briefly. “He’s not what you made him to be.”

“Isn’t he?” Haggar smiled, a toothy and thin smile. “Aren’t we all what the world has shaped us to be?”

“Enough,” Allura said. “You want us to help you take out Lotor. I have no assurance that you won’t do exactly as the Blue Paladin has said.”

Haggar’s eyelids flickered briefly, a strange and unsettling thing to watch with her pupil-less, glowing eyes. “I’m here, am I not?” she said at last. “If I betray you, my life is forfeit.”

“You’re already a traitor—an Altean, working for Zarkon?”

“You have no idea of the circumstances, girl, so have a care not to speak on things you know nothing about.” Haggar drew a breath. “Know this: my loyalty to my emperor is worth my life. Make of that what you will.”

Allura personally saw her put in one of the stasis pods, near where they’d kept Sendak, and in the end, after more yelling and debate, it was decided that for now, they wouldn’t space Haggar.

While the others filtered out of the room, Hunk paused, standing by his chair and shifting his feet awkwardly until Allura looked up from where she’d been rereading the same sensor log entry over and over.

“Hunk?”

“It’s just… it’s ready, Princess. The thing we’ve been making? It’s ready, whenever you are.”

Her stomach flipped over. After so long, she wouldn’t have to see Shiro in flickering lights and apparitions. “I understand,” she said quietly. “Thank you, Hunk. For all your hard work.”

“Yeah, of course.” He hesitated, then reached out and hugged her tightly, and Allura hadn’t realized how much she needed it until her arms were wrapping around him too.

“Thank you,” she repeated. “Thank you, Hunk.”

That night, Allura stood at the foot of her bed, staring at it for a long time before she left her rooms. She’d told the others not to be out late, lest that monster break through again and leave them caught out alone with everyone else unprepared, but it was a short enough distance to her destination, and despite the half-lighting that the castle went to during the sleep cycle, she could see well enough to find her way to the door of Shiro’s room.

It was just as she’d left it, the sheets a little mussed, the trinkets a little more scattered from their fights and their travel. But the glow panel above the bed flickered a little when she sat down on it, then slid under the blankets, pulling them around her.

“Good night, Shiro,” she murmured, and slept.

*

He noticed he hadn’t really dreamed since being here.

In one of the psychology classes he’d taken to pad his units at the Garrison, Shiro had learned that if a person didn’t dream, they tended to develop psychoses; the effect was more closely linked to the fact that they didn’t the kind of deep and restful sleep that was needed to maintain normal function. By his count, he’d been without it long enough to start feeling justifiably out of touch with reality.

The monster had released him as suddenly as it had grabbed him, howling and running off in the direction of the lion hangars and leaving him behind. Shiro had gotten to his feet and stumbled to the safest place he could think of. The strange dark particles in the room swirled around and settled on him, and at this point, he was too exhausted to care, too sick with worry for Allura, too unsure of his ability to continue on. Every time he’d been lost before he’d been able to think of ways back, been able to hold on and keep moving forward long enough. But there wasn’t a Blade member to release him and put him in a pod here; there wasn’t someone he considered family to protect him. There was just him, and whatever it was Zarkon had become, and there was _no way out_.

The misty light of the glow panel flickered, but he was too tired to sit up and do anything about it. Here, at least, the sound of metal rending would wake him up if the monster came for him. Too tired to care about how awkward it was to sleep in armor, Shiro closed his eyes, and slept.

When he opened his eyes he was back in the place where he’d fought Zarkon once, the strange and starlit void-world, and he wasn’t alone.

“Allura?”

She turned and a smile broke out over her face as she ran to him, keeling beside him where he lay on the cold ground. He tried to sit up but didn’t have the strength, and Allura put a hand on the side of his helmet as she rested her forehead against it. Shiro’s heart beat wildly in his chest as he closed his eyes, one of his hands coming up to rest on her arm. He’d wanted this, he’d let his thoughts drift to this moment so many times since waking up here.

“It’s me,” she said, her fingertips stroking the side of his helmet. He could see a worry crease in her forehead when she pulled back and tried to reach up to soothe it away, but Allura just caught his hand and held it close to her heart. “We’re going to try tomorrow to get you out, Shiro. Hunk and Pidge—they made this device that’ll make a hole between the reality you’re in and ours, it’s brilliant really, _they’re_ brilliant—but you have to listen to me.”

He didn’t want to listen, he just wanted to lay there and let her hold him and not think about darkness or monsters or anything else for the rest of eternity. But the thought of Allura putting herself in danger for him—of her coming here, the beacon of shining light that she was, she’d draw too much attention to herself and he wasn’t strong enough to protect her right now, he couldn’t take any more damage and survive.

“Don’t,” he rasped, but Allura shook her head.

“This isn’t an option,” she said firmly. “We’re going to get you out.”

“It’s not safe—“

“I haven’t been safe since the day Zarkon attacked my home, and I am _not_ one to shrink from doing what must be done.” Something passed across her face, but she shook her head and slipped an arm under his shoulders, pulling him so he was held against her. “I will not leave you here. The others, they need you to come home.” Allura paused, then tucked her head down against his. “ _I_ need you to come home,” she whispered, and his heart constricted.

“Well,” Shiro said, mustering up a smile for her. “I _do_ need a new set of paladin armor. This set, it’s… well.” He gestured to all the damage it had taken, and Allura looked at him and made a noise that was part sob, part laugh.

“You’re impossible,” she muttered, before leaning down to press a kiss to the crown of his helmet. “Stay alive, Shiro. Stay alive until we come get you.”

She made to rise but he gripped her arm tightly suddenly. “The monster,” he said in a raspy voice. “It’s Zarkon. I don’t know how, but it’s him somehow, he was sent here with me, but...”

That strange expression crossed Allura’s face again, but she just reached down and took his hands, squeezing them. “I’ll tell the others,” she said. “Don’t give in, Shiro.”

He reached for her but she was slipping away, her fingertips loose on his until they, too, were gone. Shiro let his hand fall, pulling it in against him and curling up tightly. There wasn’t a pod to steal or a plan to follow, but there were people who needed him. For them, he would keep going. For them, he would live.

*

“ _Princess?_ ”

Allura groaned, shoving her head under the pillow— _one_ pillow, not many, on top of a mattress that wasn’t as big as she remembered—

She sat bolt upright, hit her head on the low ceiling of the bed nook, and muttered some very _unladylike_ curses as she rubbed the knot forming on top of her head. “Yes,” she said at last, activating her earring comms. “Yes, I’m here, Coran.”

“ _You’re not in your room, we were worried._ ”

“I slept elsewhere.” Trying to explain that she’d gone to sleep in Shiro’s bed felt like too much, too early. “What is it?”

“ _There’s something on security footage we think you need to see_.”

She was on the bridge half a varga later, tucking the last strands of her hair back into her bun. Her fingers shook a little; today was the day, she’d told Shiro in their dream last night. Today they’d come find him and bring him home.

Coran looked back at her, a worried expression on his face. Beside him were Keith and Pidge. “What is it?” she asked, stepping up onto her dais.

“Take a look,” Keith said, and reached over, dragging the display window up onto the canopy of the bridge.

It was one of the cameras in the stasis pod chamber, coming from the side the lifts were on. There was one empty spot where Sendak’s pod had been, and in the next one, Haggar seemed to just be asleep, her eyes closed, her back hunched as always. The room was empty.

“Just watch,” Pidge said, when Allura gave her a quizzical look. Allura turned back to the feed—and jolted backward.

“Is that—“

“Yeah. The monster came to visit, but...” Keith gestured to the screen, where the great, many-limbed thing had, apparently, climbed up out of the floor. But rather than screaming or roaring and stampeding, it crouched down in front of Haggar’s tube, watching her with eyes that glowed malevolent purple.

Something Shiro had said just before she’d had to leave floated to the top of Allura’s mind. “It’s Zarkon,” she said. “I—last night, I saw Shiro, and… he said it’s how Zarkon manifests in the other world. As that… thing.”

“What?”

Keith was looking at her suddenly, his brows drawn down; Coran, too, both of them suddenly more wary. On the screen, the feed flickered, and in a burst of static, the monster was gone just as suddenly as it had appeared. Its eyes had never left Haggar’s tube.

“We can’t let you go in, Princess,” Keith said, when Coran had shut down the feed. “If that _thing_ is Zarkon, if he gets you and traps you both there—we can’t do _anything_. We can’t operate the teludav, we can’t form Voltron—it’s not what Shiro would have wanted—“

“Maybe not, but it’s what _I_ want.” Allura knew it was the sleeplessness and stress causing her to react so strongly, but she really did _not_ have the patience to have this out with Keith right now. “I cannot allow all of you to put your lives in danger every time you go out in your lions without shouldering some of the burden myself.”

“You’ve been flying the _Black lion_ ,” Keith said, spreading his hands. “You’ve painted a target on your back every time you’ve flown her. Do you think that’s somehow _less dangerous?_ Besides,” and he crossed his arms again, looking away quickly. Allura waited while he worked to collect himself, but even when he spoke again, his voice shook a little. “I—I should be the one to do it, that’s all. He’s like a brother to me, and… he’d want me to make sure you stayed safe.”

“I understand, Keith, truly.” She reached out, putting her hands on his shoulders, making him look up at her. They’d been strained before, but… she’d been in his _head_. She’d felt the deep well of emotion that he tried so very desperately to hide. “But Shiro has stood aside for me when I have asked him to, because he knows how important it is to me. And I _know_ he would understand that… that safety must sometimes be set aside to do what is right and best. I will feel safer knowing you are on the other side of this portal, guarding my back.”

Keith searched her face for a long time, then nodded. “Okay,” he said at last. “Okay.”

Allura smiled. “I will come back,” she said. “And so will Shiro.”

*

Haggar opened her eyes.

She shouldn’t have been able to, but after ten thousand years, the technology in the castle was wearing down, getting old, and the quintessence that pulsed through her veins was stronger than the engines that drove the thing that kept her imprisoned. And, when pulled on by a power beyond her, she could not help but respond.

In front of her, a huge, hulking mass crouched. It was foggy and indistinct through the curved glass of the stasis tube, the drifting mist that was supposed to keep her unconscious, that could not contain her. But she could see its eyes well enough. She could see them, glowing and purple and so painfully familiar that she could not help but react. Her body could not move, locked in place, but she could use her mind, and her mind was all that she had ever had.

She stared into eyes that were purple and malevolent, into the face of the monster, and she did not flinch away.

_What can I do, my lord?_

The monster—no, Zarkon, he would never be monstrous to her—seemed to rumble, to purr, and in her mind the solution appeared, a small device around which the paladins all turned like the hands of a clock, and in the center of it the Altean princess, surrounded in the glow of magic, and the Champion, his arms outstretched.

Haggar closed her eyes again, pleasure filling her. _I see now_ , she thought. _I know what I need to do._

*

Coran (and Keith, and Lance, and everyone else) had put up quite a fight. The monster had been drawn to this place more often than not, and if it was Zarkon it was no wonder, but for precisely that reason Allura had wanted it done here. Behind her, Black radiated pleasure in her mind, a layer below the watchfulness. It was right and good that her paladin be returned to her, here, by Allura. As Pidge and Hunk got their equipment set up, she went and put a hand on one of Black’s paws.

 _He’ll come back to you soon,_ she thought. _You’ll have your real pilot back soon._

Black rumbled, causing everything in the hangar to vibrate slightly. Her head bent slightly so one great golden eye could fix on Allura, and an overwhelming sense of affection filled her, along with the clearest string of thought that she’d ever gotten from Black or any lion.

 _You will both always belong to me,_ Black seemed to say. _Two hearts, one lion._

Allura smiled.

“We’re ready whenever you are, Princess,” Pidge called from across the hangar.

The device they’d designed was smaller than she thought it would be, and when Allura took stock of it she couldn’t help asking, “Is this _really_ it?”

“The design is elegant and efficient,” Slav said, plugging three cords into one of the consoles in the hangar. “We only need you to activate it. Put your hands on the metal plates and channel quintessence.”

Allura pressed her palms to the cool metal, feeling it warm to her body temperature. The plates were connected to a boxy-looking contraption, which was in turn connected by heavy cables to the device itself. Closing her eyes, she began to channel, listening as Pidge and Slav called out the levels.

“We’re at forty percent,” Pidge said. “We need to get to at least ninety before anything interesting’s gonna happen. Princess—woah, okay—“

Dimly, she heard Hunk ask a question. She couldn’t focus on much beyond opening herself as much as possible, but she caught snatches of the conversation.

“...jumped there—and again—we’re at fifty percent now...”

“...doesn’t look good...”

“...venty percent...”

“...put a stop to this, I have a duty to protect—“

“No, Allura ground out, opening her eyes as much as she could. Her hands were invisible through the bright glow around them, blue and pink flickering through it in equal measure. “I—I must do this—“

She reached deeper inside. Even on the Balmera she’d never dug so far down into her reserves, but she’d never had the image of Shiro, exhausted and leaning desperately into her hands, with her when she’d been on the Balmera. It was enough for her to grind her teeth and shove through, and when she heard a new thrumming noise full the air, accompanied by noises of surprise and alarm, Allura opened her eyes again.

The gate yawned open before her, black and oily against the bright metal of the hangar wall. It seemed to pulse and shudder as though alive as the edges of it slowly peeled back, a deadly and hideous flower opening before her as the device she was powering sent out pulses of energy that made the air look like it was shimmering with heat. But when Pidge told her she could step away, Allura reached out, putting her hand in its path. It was icy cold.

“It’s on castle power now, Princess,” Slav said, anxiously switching between three different consoles. “I would advise leaving _now_ , because in eighty-three percent of realities, we only have half an hour before the rift in reality is closed completely.”

Everyone was staring at her strangely, and when Allura picked up her helmet to put it on, she caught a ghostly reflection of herself in the visor. Limned in pink-white light, she glowed against the darkness of the hangar. Looking down at her hands, she realized that despite the huge amount of power she’d just expended, she didn’t feel tired. Looking at Pidge got her nothing; the Green Paladin had turned away, looking at something else on another display. Keith and Lance were flanking the portal, their bayards at the ready. Keith shifted as she got close.

“You’re sure about going in alone?” he asked. Allura slipped her helmet on over her head, hearing the slight hiss of air as it pressurized. Black particles—some strange effluence from the gate—bumped off the visor.

“I’m certain,” she replied. “Half a varga, you said, Pidge?”

“Syncing HUD chronos now.”

A timer appeared in the corner of her HUD, counting down from thirty. She felt for her staff, collapsed at the small of her back, touched the sensor at her leg where she’d stored Shiro’s bayard, and took a deep breath. “If I do not return in twenty-five minutes,” she said, “Shut it down.”

“But—“

“I won’t put the integrity of our own defenses at risk. We draw too much power and it leaves us without means of protection or attack should Lotor strike again. I _order_ it. Keith, Coran, do you understand?”

She turned, looking at each of them in turn until they relented. Allura had no illusions that if they hit that mark and she hadn’t returned, that one or both of them would run inside after her. But she hoped that someone, at least, would listen. Turning back to the gate, she took a deep breath, and stepped through.

It was… unpleasant. For a long moment she couldn’t see anything, and the walls of the gate squeezed against her, sick and wet noises filling her audio sensors and making her shudder in revulsion. But she took one step, and then another, and then her searching fingers didn’t hit any strange walls and she emerged into a hangar that was the mirror of the one she’d just left—if the hangar had a pile of scrap metal in it, instead of a lion and her paladins.

 _Is this what’s left of you?_ Allura thought, reaching out to the connection she had with Black. Seeing through her eyes, she felt the lion recoil slightly. Whatever this was, whatever it had once been, it was _not_ her. Allura still pressed her palm to a piece of metal she knew to have once been the great lion’s muzzle, rusted and broken as it was.

“All right,” she said, and activated her suit comm. “Shiro? Can you hear me?”

No answer, and after a minute, she turned off the comm. He’d probably kept it off to conserve suit power—a prudent choice, but one that made finding him more difficult. Allura had the feeling that she couldn’t trust her suit sensors here, and with the chrono ticking inexorably down, she didn’t have the time to waste on coming up with a better idea.

“Well, nothing for it,” she said brightly. “If I were Shiro… I’d go to the place where people had seen me last.”

She realized she was still glowing faintly as she walked through the castle, and it was… comforting, in a way that she didn’t know how to quantify. The castle had been her home for many years prior to the war, and had been her shield while she slept in the pod. But despite that it had its share of problems related to running for far longer than ever intended, despite running on essentially a skeleton crew for many months, the castle had always felt like it was alive. This place… there was no life to it, no sense of power. The decking didn’t vibrate under her boots when she paused, using her scanners as much as possible to scout ahead. The readings she got were, as predicted, confusing. But it gave her a small measure of comfort, as did the glow of power. Strange and unexpected, this capacity for quintessence manipulation still was probably the only reason she was still moving.

The paladin barracks were on a level lower down than Black’s hangar, and she didn’t want to risk getting caught in a lift tunnel, so Allura took to the maintenance shafts. They were dark, full of more of the shadowy particles, and there seemed to be invisible hands reaching out to touch her as she descended to the appropriate level. Emerging out into the corridor, she _definitely_ felt something trying to grasp at her wrists, her ankles, to keep her in the dark. Trying and failing to swallow a yelp, Allura scrambled out of the shaft, watching as curls of shadow rose into the air and dissipated as soon as light touched them.

 _What a nightmarish place this is_ , she thought, and then, _He’s been alone here for days. No wonder…_

She turned and looked down the corridor. The floor seemed to be covered in shadow, but as she walked she realized that it behaved more like dust, darkness kicked up and swirling around her ankles.

The ghostly lights along the corridor flickered as she passed. Maybe it was the quintessence still pulsing along her skin, or the strangeness of the place, but she seemed to feel these too, tickling against her senses. But the two lights on either side of the door at the end of the corridor were definitely brighter, and when she looked at the door, she could see the indents of fingers on it, and touched them. They were the right size for the fingers she remembered well, grasping her hand, holding it for a few moments before slipping away. Pressing against the tiny crack in between door and jamb, she called out, “Shiro?”

No response.

Allura grasped the door and pulled, and it yielded easily—though the sound of rending metal made her wince and freeze, looking up and down the corridor and waiting before slipping into the room.

At first, she thought it was empty. She’d expected at least the noise of the door to wake him up if he was sleeping, but nothing in the room moved, and though the particles swirled away from her, forming ephemeral shapes that moved in her periphery and made her jump, anytime she turned the shapes didn’t resolve into the one she wanted to see. It wasn’t until she looked closer at the bed niche that she realized what she was seeing, and when she did, she rushed over, reaching into the blanket of darkness and pulling Shiro out of it.

“Wake up, wake up,” she whispered, trying to clear the darkness from his visor so she could look it. It was sticky, it didn’t want to let him go. “Wake _up_ , Shiro, for the love of the Ancients—“

He gasped, his eyes springing wide and afraid—and then squeezing shut, wincing as soon as the light coming off her hit him. “Allura?” he whispered, voice raspy. “Allura, ‘s that you?”

“I’m here,” she whispered, and just as she had in the dream she cradled him against her. The chrono was ticking down, but she didn’t care. For the few ticks it would take to let him know he was no longer alone, it didn’t matter, and when he wrapped an arm weakly around her and pulled himself in, she could feel them both shaking. “I’m here to take you home.”

“You shouldn’t have come,” he mumbled, but struggled to get up anyway, using her to balance him. Now that he was standing before her, Allura had to swallow her horror at his appearance. Haggard, his armor scuffed and broken in places, dark circles under his eyes—but nonetheless he was trying to stand up straight, trying to be strong before her. _Beautiful, blessed man_ , she thought, and looped an arm around his waist.

“I never liked being told what I shouldn’t do,” she replied. “It always left a bad taste in my mouth.”

“Sorry.”

“No need. But perhaps protesting when you’re being rescued isn’t advisable.” She grinned at him, relieved despite his appearance. “Not everyone is as nice as I am.”

He huffed laughter, passing a hand over his visor. More of the darkness sloughed off as he did so, and he peered at her. “Did you know you’re glowing?”

“I did, actually.” They got to the lift doors, and Allura paused, thinking how they ought to do this. She wouldn’t make him climb the maintenance shafts, but this wouldn’t be any better. “I met some Alteans who think it’s that my abilities to use quintessence are enhanced. Another level beyond.”

“Alteans?”

“Yes, a whole settlement of them, hidden away for thousands of years.”

“Huh.” Shiro took a breath, looking up the shaft. “Princess…”

“I’m going to carry you,” she said abruptly. “Hold on a tick.”

Shiro grinned a little as she closed her eyes and _stretched_ , growing to a size about a foot taller than he was. “Amazing.”

“You’re delirious.”

“Probably. Doesn’t make it less amazing. Do I, uh...”

“Wrap your arms around my shoulders and hold on.”

With Shiro clinging to her back, Allura began climbing the shaft. It was slow going—there weren’t many handholds, and Shiro seemed to be drifting a little, his helmet bumping against hers. Looking at his arms—clawed up, the black suit and the armor torn and broken and bloody with what she _sincerely_ hoped wasn’t all his own blood—kept her going. She had to get him back to a healing pod, she had to see him safe.

The pink light around her didn’t fade, and anytime she felt a tremor in her legs or felt her grip slipping, warmth flooded the area, and in a moment she felt strong again. Whatever power she’d tapped into inside her, it was keeping them both safe. Shiro seemed a little better when she nudged him out of his stupor after climbing out of the shaft, and as they rested for a moment, she tapped her thigh. The bayard appeared in her palm and she handed it over to him.

“In case we run into trouble,” Allura said, “I think you ought to have this. It belongs to you, anyway, and you’ve waited long enough to have it.”

Shiro looked at the bayard for a long time before he reached out and took it. It remained inert, but he straightened as though strength had returned to him and looked a little more like the Shiro she remembered, her paladin. “Hopefully I don’t need it,” he said. “I don’t know if...”

“Well, then it’s good you have me here to protect you.” Allura took his hand, holding it tightly as they moved as fast and as silently as possible down the corridor. “I’ll protect both of us.”

*

Keith watched the gate, shifting his bayard from hand to hand. His palms were sweaty inside his gloves, and his whole body felt like a rubber band wound up too tightly, waiting for an attack that refused to come.

“How long do they have left?”

Pidge looked up from something she’d been staring at on her laptop for the last few minutes, checking the chrono. “Nine minutes,” she replied. Keith turned back to the gate.

“They should have come out by now. I’ve got to go in.”

“Maybe it’s just taking her longer to find him,” Lance said, shifting closer. “Maybe he’s in bad shape and she’s having to carry him. Just… just be patient, okay?”

“If he’s unconscious she needs help, she can’t defend them both and _carry him—_ Lance, let me _go—_ “

Lance had snaked out an arm across his chest, blocking him from moving forward anymore. As wiry as his frame was, Lance was strong enough to push him _back_ a little. “I’m not going to let you put yourself in danger if there’s no reason to,” he said. “You heard Allura. She wants us to stay here.”

“She also wants us to _lock her in another reality with no hope of rescue_.”

“Yeah, well...” Lance looked at the gate, swallowing. “If anyone can get Shiro out safely it’s her. So just… give it a little bit l—“

A distant roar filled the hangar. They pulled apart, Lance raising his gun and Keith bringing his sword up to guard, back to back. “Guys?” Lance asked.

“Nothing on sensors,” Hunk said, his voice shaking. “Maybe it… came from in there?”

He pointed at the gate. Keith felt his blood go cold.

“It’s waiting for them,” he whispered.

*

Allura widened the hole that Shiro had made before so it was easier for him to climb through. He did so, going even paler as whatever he was doing pulled on some wound she couldn’t see.

“Are you all right?”

“Definitely not.” He straightened, wincing again, a hand tucked around his ribs. “Getting thrown against walls and clawed up by the weird manifestation of your worst enemy _hurts_.”

“I can imagine. We’re close now, Shiro, and the first thing we’re going to do is get you to a healing pod.”

“Can I shower first? I don’t want to get blood, or...” he waved a hand through the air, stirring the black particles around them, “This stuff all over the inside of those things. It’ll never come out.”

She smiled, shaking her head. “You don’t have to do that with me,” she said gently.

“Do what?”

“Hide.” _Hide your pain, hide your true feelings, hide_ anything _. You’ll always be able to show me._

Shiro looked at her as they hobbled slowly across the hangar, and when Allura looked at him, she could see he was smiling, his eyes soft. Her heart stuttered.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and then his eyes widened, and he yanked her back, spinning to put his body between her and the clawed limb coming down right where they’d been standing. There was a flash of light, a roar, and Allura felt the rush of wind over her suit as the beast swiped again. This time it hit something that made a resounding _clang_. Shiro was breathing heavily at her back, and Allura twisted to see what was going on, her fingers pulling her staff out of its belt loops as she did.

Shiro was crouched over her—sweaty and pale, but clearly running on an adrenaline high, his eyes bright. One arm was braced beside her on the ground, the other held his bayard up above them both—his bayard that had taken the form of a circular shield. Shiro looked at it.

“Huh,” he said. “Did you expect that?”

“The monster, or—“

“The bayard.”

“You’re constantly unexpected.” Allura flung her hand with her staff out to the side and it extended as she scrambled to her feet. “We’ve got to go, Shiro, we’ve got to get through the gate before it closes! _There_ , over there, do you see?”

The gate was pulsing still, more rapidly and unevenly than before. The thought of pushing through that slick wet gap made her gorge rise, but Allura pushed it aside and pushed Shiro ahead of her.

The beast—Zarkon, or what was left of his mind—charged again. Maddeningly Shiro turned and braced himself behind his bayard. “You go first!”

“No. _No_ , we are _not_ doing this again!” Allura watched him grunt, saw how his limbs trembled as he bore the brunt of Zarkon’s attack on them. She struck out with her staff, and this time as she connected there was a flash of light, a sizzling sound, and a howl. Allura ground her teeth and struck again, harder, and sent the beast flying back.

“And I’m not leaving _you_ behind—“ Shiro grabbed her hand and _pulled_ , and they jumped in together.

The gate didn’t want to let them go. She could feel the darkness grasping at her, felt Shiro falter more than once beside her, but he didn’t let go of her hand and she wasn’t sure she would be able to let him go either, their hands locked together as they pushed through tendrils that seemed to knit together. Angrily she lashed out with a hand that glowed brighter pink for a second, and the tendrils recoiled from her, and suddenly they were tumbling out onto the hangar floor in a rush of slick black fluid and those strange floating particles. Black was roaring and stomping on her dais, everyone was yelling, and behind her she heard the gate making noises, felt another roar deep in her bones.

Despite that she suddenly felt incredibly tired, Allura scrambled to her feet, clawing strings of unidentifiable black goop off her as she slid across the hangar floor toward the device they’d used to open the gate. “Shut it off!” she gasped out. “Shut it down, that thing’s right behind us, _close the gate now!_ ”

She heard someone, she thought it was Hunk, acknowledge her, but she was already sliding back across the floor toward Shiro to pull him back, pull him toward Black. The lion would protect them if Allura could not, and Shiro was in far worse shape, his bayard scraping on the deck as he tried to move with her, help her. They ended up against one of Black’s paws and she finally stopped moving, crouched low over both of them, growling and lashing her tail angrily back and forth.

Dimly she saw the waves of energy abruptly stop emanating from the gate device, saw the edges of it become suddenly shriveled as it curled back in on itself, the slick blackness pulling away from the bright and familiar metal until, with a final faint roar from the monster within, it disappeared completely.

Allura slumped, her fingers searching out Shiro’s beside her. He was barely conscious but she felt him grip her hand weakly, his helmet lolling against her shoulder as the others ran over to them, crowding around.

“Shiro!” Keith was saying, gripping his friend’s shoulders. He looked pale and panicked, and with how Shiro looked, Allura couldn’t really blame him. “Shiro, can you hear me? Shiro?”

Shiro made a choking noise she realized was supposed to be a laugh. “Look, Keith,” he said, and she heard his bayard rattle against the deck. “I’m Captain America.”

“Princess?” That was Coran, but it seemed perhaps they hadn’t succeeded in shutting off the gate device, because darkness was creeping in at the edge of her vision as she looked up at him. He was clearly mad with worry, his hands holding her face, making her look at him. “Allura, are you all right, can you hear me, _Allura—_ “

“I did it,” she whispered. “I saved him.”

The last feeling she was aware of, the last thing that reached her mind before she lost consciousness, was the feeling of Shiro squeezing her hand again.

*

Whispers, and the shudder of the stasis pod around her, brought Haggar out of her slumber. This time there were no purple eyes to meet her, no indistinct but commanding presence to give her clarity of thought. But she didn’t need it.

The castle shook again. An attack, probably Lotor. The perfect cover.

Haggar gathered quintessence at her fingertip and drew it down the inside of the tube. In the time it took to blink, the glass had vanished, and she gathered her robes around her and stepped out. No alarms went off—the castle defenses and sensors were probably too occupied with what was going on outside to keep an eye on what was going on _inside._ In the world she occupied there were no coincidences, only strings of fate too great and terrible for most people to understand or manipulate. But she was not, nor had she ever been, _most people_ , and she had a task to complete.

Only once did she look back, at the tube standing beside her stasis pod. Brilliant violet fractals spiraled out to the edges, her thoughts and memories and all that made Haggar who and what she was. For a moment she tilted her head, considering the worth in destroying it, but the castle shook again and she turned and left. Let them have this facsimile of her. It would never be as good as the real thing.

The shadows whispered to her again as she moved among them, flitting from room to room and hall to hall until she reached an empty hangar lit by violet and aqua glow panels. It was a place she knew well, a place she’d spent many years in _before._ But it was not hers anymore, nor her lord’s, and her current objective was not nostalgia but recovery. The floor in one area was scraped and cloudy, equipment resting on crates pushed against the wall, and that was where she needed to be.

The device was small and light, and Haggar gave it a skeptical look at first. If this was the thing she could use to help pull her lord back into his own body, it was awfully small. But the thing radiated quintessence that reeked of the Altean princess, and so Haggar gripped it tightly as she threw her awareness out into the fleet beyond the castle, slowly being picked off by Voltron, until— _there._

She vanished, and reappeared on the bridge of one of the ships of the fleet, standing between two of her druids. They acknowledged her only with nods, not surprised at her sudden appearance. The commander of the ship was less amused.

“How did you—“ was all he managed to get out before black-purple lightning took him in the chest, flinging him against the bridge canopy. Haggar took his place.

“Take us away from here,” she ordered, and as the ship came about and the stars before them became streaks, Haggar smiled under her hood.

 _You will be with us again soon, my lord_.

*

It was disorienting to wake in the light.

When he was fully aware, Shiro felt his heart rate jump and his stomach roil until the front of the healing pod opened and he was allowed to stumble out. After days in darkness, the infirmary was almost _too_ bright, and he put a hand over his eyes, wincing as an alarm noise filled the room.

It subsided as soon as the doors opened, admitting the other four paladins and Coran—and Allura, in the back. She still looked wan, but she was smiling at him as everyone else tried to hug him at once. He endured it as long as he could, even though it made his skin crawl with anxiety, too overstimulated to sort things out.

 _They’re just happy to see you,_ Shiro told himself. _They don’t mean you harm. You can relax._

It didn’t work after a while, and he felt Black shift around in her place in his mind just as Allura stepped up suddenly, clapping her hands to get everyone’s attention.

“All right, everyone,” she said. “Go get cleaned up and see to your lions. We’ll meet up tomorrow. _All_ of us,” and here she pointedly looked at him before she turned and left.

 _Don’t go_ , his heart cried. She had come to him, a figure of beautiful light cutting through the darkness of his despair. He didn’t ever want to be without her.

But he had to shower (Coran had turned off the water conservation protocols for him) and stood under the spray for a long time, his face turned up to it. He felt washed clean, but when he turned around and looked through the wavy barrier that the ship put up to keep water from getting everywhere his breath caught and he had to put out hands, touch the walls of the shower and close his eyes and count his breaths until he could shut off the water and step out. It had looked… unreal. Like reality, but darker, less substantive.

Keith handed him clothes around the barrier, and Shiro was glad for both the companionship and the silence, the quiet comfort that just being in a room with another living person brought him. When he’d gotten his clothes on and had sat down to put his boots on, Keith stood across from him, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“What is it?” Shiro asked when he’d finished and stood. He felt new again, different. Not better, but… transformed.

Keith’s hands fidgeted in his pockets for a minute, but then he rushed forward, his arms wrapping around Shiro, squeezing so tightly that the breath left him. “I thought you were gone,” he said. “And I tried to pilot Black, I did, just like you wanted, but I couldn’t do it Shiro, and I felt _guilty_ , and I felt _worse_ for letting Allura get in Black and put herself in danger because I know that’s not what you would have wanted—“

“Yeah, well, none of us can stop the Princess when she wants to do something.” But Shiro returned the hug. “I’m glad you tried, though. I do think you’ll be a great leader, Keith. I think you’ve got it in you.”

“Not now. Not like this.”

“No, maybe not like this. But sometime. And don’t feel guilty.”

“I just—“ Keith huffed, stepping back, and Shiro let him go. Keith had his own ways of expressing himself, and Shiro had learned to let them happen on Keith’s own time rather than try to force them. It never worked out. So he waited patiently for Keith to find the words.

“I just know what she means to you.”

“I don’t know what—“

“I’m not _stupid_.” Keith crossed his arms, but there was a small smile starting up. “And besides, she walked into hell for you.”

“You’d have done the same.”

“I tried, but.” He shrugged. “We can’t stop her when she wants to do something. I couldn’t stop her from going to find you.”

Those words rattled around his head as he finally left his room later on. The castle was entering its night cycle, and for a minute the glow panels looked _too_ dim, _too_ much like the will o’the wisps he’d seen in the other reality—but then he blinked and they were back to their normal levels, and the lift came when he pressed the button, and when he walked onto the bridge, the canopy was open to reveal a broad starfield.

Allura was on her dais, studying a series of displays ringed around her, and for a moment Shiro hung back. She hadn’t heard him come in, focused on her work, and the sight of her against the stars was something he couldn’t yet grasp, a feeling just beginning to grow in his heart that he couldn’t quite name. She was his light, and for now, he was content with that.

“Oh,” she said, when he finally moved into her field of view. “I thought you’d have wanted to rest.”

“I’ve got some catching up to do. No time like the present.” But he didn’t move to his station on the bridge. Allura shifted beside him, her shoulder bumping against his arm, and when he’d finished debating with himself, Shiro reached down and took her hand. For once his dreams in the healing pod hadn’t been dark, purple-tinged things. He’d dreamed of the way she’d grabbed his hand and pulled him along, of how she’d held him when he’d dreamed in the dark.

“I wondered something.” Allura dismissed her screens and turned so she was facing him, their linked hands dangling between them. “When you were in the—the other place. You kept appearing here.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Shiro looked out at the stars again, because it was easier than looking directly at Allura. He could see their reflections overlapping in the canopy, her head tilted up to look at him. “I don’t know, I just felt safe here. There was always this… glow here, where you stand. It made me feel like, I don’t know, like you were with me. Even in that other world, you were there, and I wasn’t… I wasn’t alone.”

She was quiet for a long time, until he felt something on his Galra hand, and looked down to see her fingers squeezing. “You never have to be alone, you know,” she said carefully, and now she was the one who couldn’t quite look at him. “Black told me—“

“Apparently she told you a _lot_.”

“And I am _quite glad_ she did, otherwise where would we be?” Allura made a face up at him. “How long did you intend to keep _that_ under wraps?”

“I don’t know. It just never… the timing never seemed right.”

“I don’t think we get that luxury, you and I. The right timing, I mean. But all I know is—I felt what you feel, when I flew Black. You aren’t alone.”

She was looking up at him and the stars above were reflected in her eyes, and when Shiro finally got the hint and kissed her he felt something, a resonance between her mind and his, forever linked by their lion.

Allura had reached into the darkness and pulled him out, and when they pulled apart to breathe, Shiro could feel things inside him beginning to knit together. The pieces weren’t going to fit quite right, probably not ever again for either of them, but they could fill in the gaps together. Not the same, but… transformed.

“So,” Allura said. “If you’re willing to jump right back in—some things have happened while you’ve been away.”

“I heard about a few of them.” Shiro looked at his station and decided that no, he was good right here, with one arm around Allura’s shoulders as she pulled her displays back up. “Haggar—“

“Escaped, right under our noses. But that battle with Lotor was a rout, because she took half his fleet with her.” Allura pulled up a map with Galra troop movements. “We’ve got them on the run.”

They fell into a familiar rhythm, a give and take that felt as natural as breathing. There were other worlds out there, other worlds than these, but in this one he stood next to Allura and planned their next move.

In this one, he was home.


End file.
